Why I'm Glad I Wasn't A Math Teacher

While those heard-headed pragmatists who rule the world today often disdain 'soft' subjects like English literature, sociology, and a host of other disciplines that require nuanced, as opposed to blunt thinking, I am glad that I was an English teacher instead of one dispensing the wonders of mathematics.

Even though he might have been what we used to euphemistically call 'a difficult-to-serve client,' young Tim Hudak these days must be causing his old math teachers (and probably their entire brethren of colleagues) some embarrassment and grief, for one simple reason: they just did not meet his needs, clearly reflected in the fact that his figures just don't add up.

During this Ontario election campaign, the would-be but failed wunderkind is traipsing throughout the province promising a remarkable 'million jobs' if only less enlightened souls entrust him with the task on June 12. But whatever arcane formula he is using to rescue us from our weaker moments of compassion for our fellow citizens and the necessary accompanying progressive legislation seems, to put it politely, flawed.

First, to his figures as reported in The Toronto Star:

Based on the previous decade’s average, 523,200 jobs would develop over eight years if he did nothing.

Lowering corporate taxes from 11.5 per cent to 8 per cent would generate an additional 119,808 jobs.

Ending wind and solar energy subsidies would spark another 40,364 jobs and cutting the regulatory burden of red tape would mean an extra 84,800 new private-sector positions.

Revamping Ontario’s restrictive apprenticeship programs would mean 170,240 jobs.

Hudak believes another 96,000 jobs would come from public transit expansion in the Greater Toronto and Hamilton Area.

In his second mandate — after the 2018 election — he would reduce personal income taxes to generate 47,080 jobs.

Have these numbers been vetted and approved by economists? Well, kinda, sorta, not really.

Apparently, as reported in The Ottawa Citizen, the Tories sought the imprimatur of one Benjamin Zycher, a Californian who’s associated with the Pacific Research Institute and the American Enterprise Institute, intellectual cousins of Canada’s Fraser Institute.

The only problem is that Zycher never looked at the Hudak plan:

His work was done months before the current election campaign and it’s not based on the specifics of what Hudak says he would do as premier. It’s a more philosophical take on eliminating regulations, giving up on green energy, cutting corporate taxes, and reducing trade barriers with other provinces.

Is this kind of faith-based, aspirational plan something that the voters of Ontario want to embrace?

As reported in today's Star, it would seem that young Tim has underestimated the discernment of the Ontario electorate:

Nearly two-thirds of Ontarians disapprove of Tim Hudak’s plan to cut 100,000 public servants to streamline government, a new poll suggests.

The Forum Research survey also found‎ 63 per cent do not think the Progressive Conservative leader will be able to create his promised 1 million new jobs, while 26 per cent feel he can deliver and 11 per cent don’t know.

Similarly, 26 per cent approve of cutting 100,000 public-sector workers — such as teachers and bureaucrats — while 62 per cent do not and‎ 11 per cent aren’t sure.

Parenthetically, one can't help but wonder if disapproval would be even higher if people knew that Tim's plan doesn't involve just the dismissal of faceless bureaucrats but also includes nursing home caregivers, educational assistants, front-line educators, homecare workers, etc., while upping corporate welfare through a 30% reduction in the corporate tax rate.

Rarely are voters offered such a dramatic and opposing vision. The embrace and elevation of the self to the exclusion of concern for the collective. I guess at least for that, we should thank Tim Hudak.

For more about young Tim, check out this comment by one of my blog readers.

Meanwhile, Back In The Land of Ontario Election Campaigns....

The mask of boyish innocence was slowly slipping away from young Tim Hudak.



H/t Toronto Star



H/t Ray Mirshahi

Don't Worry; Be Happy

Apparently those of us who fret about the ever-growing magnitude of climate change effects are just not grasping the truth. As The National Post's Peter Foster recently explained at a gathering of the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers, the oil industry just isn't adequately communicating why climate change skeptics are right:

What Stephen Harper, Tim Hudak And The Rest of The Neocons Really Think

Who's Afraid Of The Big Bad Electorate?

Some critical thinkers might conclude it is the Harper regime, given the curious date they have assigned for four federal byelections.

We're Not Paying You To Tell Us Something We Don't Want To Know

That would seem to be the mentality behind the Harper regime's chopping of $1.2 million from the federal Justice Department's research budget.

As reported by the CBC, the cut, which represents 20% of the department's research budget and will result in the termination of eight very experienced legal researchers, seems to have been prompted by its penchant for uncovering some inconvenient truths that run counter to the regime's simplistic law-and-order agenda:

Previous legal research in the department sometimes caught senior officials "off-guard ... and may even have run contrary to government direction," says an internal report for deputy minister William Pentney.

What was the nature of that research? The internal memo, obtained by the Canadian Press under an Access to Information request, doesn't offer specifics, but observes that past projects have "at times left the impression that research is undermining government decisions."

The fact of the Harper cabal's fondness for fostering ignorance over knowledge is suggested by a department report last year on public confidence in the justice system [that] appeared to be at odds with the Conservative government's agenda.

Researcher Charlotte Fraser found many Canadians lacked confidence in the courts and prison system, but suggested it was the result of misunderstanding rather than any failures in the system, and that education could rectify the problem.

Critics said the finding was contrary to the government's approach, which is to pass tougher laws and impose harsher penalties rather than to cultivate a better-informed public.

Other research also offered refutation of the Harper Hammer of Justice approach so favoured by the red-meat set:

Another 2011 study, on the sentencing of drunk drivers, found that harsher terms for first offenders had little bearing on whether they re-offended — a finding critics held to be contrary to the government's agenda of tougher sentencing through mandatory minimums and other measures.

It is often said that good help is hard to find. And of course good help in Harperland consists of those who follow Dear Leader's imperatives without question. So the regime has sent out a powerful message to those who would enter public service under its aegis: Those with integrity need not apply.

Oops!

But at least young Tim manages to retain his boyish grin during yet another campaign gaffe.

UPDATED: The 'Robin-Hood Tax' Gains Traction

In a declaration that will likely earn him the designation 'Enemy of the Capitalist State,' Pope Francis recently called upon the world to redistribute its wealth in order to reduce what is likely the greatest socio-economic scourge of our times, income inequality.

In his address to U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon and other U.N. leaders, the Pope said:

“Specifically, this involves challenging all forms of injustices and resisting the economy of exclusion, the throwaway culture and the culture of death which nowadays sadly risk becoming passively accepted” .

While Francis hinted that a more equitable tax regime would help in this goal, he was short on specifics. Perhaps progressive states in Europe have hit upon an elegant yet simple solution: the Robin Hood Tax, a.k.a. The Tobin Tax, also called, within its Eurpoean context, the European Financial Transaction Tax.

The levy, about which I have written previously on this blog, would be a painless and very progressive measure that could be used not only to address the aforementioned inequality, but also a host of other urgent issues confronting the world. It could create jobs; spur economic development beyond the financial industry; and combat climate change, global poverty and HIV/AIDS.

While it would be naive to believe that any one measure could solve all of our problems, the ability to mitigate them is clearly within the tax's purview.

In the current proposed version backed by an 11-nation coalition, here is how it would work, as reported by Katrina vanden Heuvel in The National:


The proposed tax includes a 0.1 percent tax on stock and bond trades and a tax of 0.01 percent on derivatives. It’s now expected that the tax will indeed be phased in, with the levy on stock-trades comprising the first step. Reportedly, the finance ministers involved in the negotiations plan to use the rest of the year to negotiate over taxes on derivative-trading, which could be introduced later in a second phase. While the German government is reportedly determined to get an agreement from the outset to include derivatives, there has been some resistance, including from the supposedly more left-wing French government.


Its benefits would be many. Opposition to it is fierce and passionate. But with every indication that it is rapidly moving toward a European implementation, a critical mass is being reached. The fact that progressivity is not dead in Europe should give us all enough heart to reignite our passion for a more equitable world, a world in which the neo-liberal agenda no longer completely holds sway as it gives to the few while willfully withholding from the many.

UPDATE: Well, it certainly didn't take long for the right-wing to react to the Pope's suggestion. Let's just say, they didn't take it well:

"I've Gone To The Dark Side": A Guest Post From The Mound Of Sound

I received this essay from Mound yesterday. He asked me to read it carefully before deciding whether to post it, given its dark, apocalyptic overtones. I acquiesced in the Mound's request and concluded there was no way I would not put it on my blog, dealing as it does with issues and truths that, as a species, we have far too long been willfully blind to. My philosophy has always been, 'Better a bitter truth than a sweet lie.'

So, just as Neo does in The Matrix, prepare to swallow a pill that will point you to the harsh realities of our existences:

I have fallen in league with The Dark Mountain.

If you read the final post on The Disaffected Lib you'll understand how effortless it was for me to convert. The Dark Mountain is a place for disaffected artists, writers and thinkers "who have stopped believing the stories our civilization tells itself."

Here (in italics) are excerpts from the Dark Mountain manifesto you may find helpful:

‘Few men realise,’ wrote Joseph Conrad in 1896, ‘that their life, the very essence of their character, their capabilities and their audacities, are only the expression of their belief in the safety of their surroundings.’ Conrad’s writings exposed the civilisation exported by European imperialists to be little more than a comforting illusion, not only in the dark, unconquerable heart of Africa, but in the whited sepulchres of their capital cities. The inhabitants of that civilisation believed ‘blindly in the irresistible force of its institutions and its morals, in the power of its police and of its opinion,’ but their confidence could be maintained only by the seeming solidity of the crowd of like-minded believers surrounding them. Outside the walls, the wild remained as close to the surface as blood under skin, though the city-dweller was no longer equipped to face it directly.

Bertrand Russell caught this vein in Conrad’s worldview, suggesting that the novelist ‘thought of civilised and morally tolerable human life as a dangerous walk on a thin crust of barely cooled lava which at any moment might break and let the unwary sink into fiery depths.’ What both Russell and Conrad were getting at was a simple fact which any historian could confirm: human civilisation is an intensely fragile construction. It is built on little more than belief: belief in the rightness of its values; belief in the strength of its system of law and order; belief in its currency; above all, perhaps, belief in its future.

Once that belief begins to crumble, the collapse of a civilisation may become unstoppable. That civilisations fall, sooner or later, is as much a law of history as gravity is a law of physics. What remains after the fall is a wild mixture of cultural debris, confused and angry people whose certainties have betrayed them, and those forces which were always there, deeper than the foundations of the city walls: the desire to survive and the desire for meaning.


Over the six plus years I maintained The Disaffected Lib I explored at some length this business of climate change and the impacts it would inflict on our world. That process led to a host of related realizations, an awareness that anthropogenic global warming, enormously dangerous as it may be, is but one of a matrix of challenges that must all be fixed if we're to resolve any of them.

I gradually became aware of the incredible fragility of this global civilization we have crafted and that its assumed prowess is illusory. As Joseph Conrad and Bertrand Russell warned, our global civilization indeed rests on a foundation of beliefs that, for several decades, have become detached from fact and reality. We have constructed our civilization on myths and probably lethal fantasy.

It's one thing to accept that mankind is using renewable resources at 1.5 times the planet's replenishment rate. It's another thing altogether to realize that our civilization has become dependent on that excessive consumption and that dependency is growing faster with each passing year. We simply cannot do without ever more of something, so many things that can only destroy us.

Proof of the mortal fragility of our global civilization is made out in this addictive dependency on excessive, utterly unsustainable consumption. The evidence is palpable, tangible, even visible to the naked eye from space. From the orbiting International Space Station we see rivers that no longer flow to the sea; spreading deforestation; desertification evidenced in dust clouds that rise in China and are carried on the winds across the Pacific to North America; the contamination of coastal waters from agricultural and industrial runoffs; the tailing ponds of the Athabasca Tar Sands. Satellites record surface subsidence caused by the draining of aquifers for irrigation. At our docks we have the measure of the collapse of global fisheries around the world. Around the world, air, water and soil contamination attests to the ease with which we now overwhelm the environment's capacity to absorb and cleanse our waste. These things, jointly and severally, stand as conclusive proofs of our steadily worsening addiction to excessive, unsustainable consumption.

This is the hallmark of the fragility of our global civilization. In the span of just two centuries, a blip in the history of mankind, we have grown our population sevenfold and we're proposing to extend that to 9 or 10 times or more. At the same time as we're adding new mouths by the hundreds of millions, we're increasing their per capita consumption.

We have grown our global population to such gargantuan proportions through our amazing ability to exploit cheap, abundant, non-renewable resources, especially fossil fuels. We never stop to ponder where those fossil fuels came from. We don't realize that they are the end product of organic life laid down over hundreds of millions, perhaps a billion years or more. How could dragging that resource to be burned at the surface over just a couple of centuries possibly destroy the environment? How could it not?

Growth. Growth, growth, growth. Growth in population. Growth in consumption. Growth in production. Growth in every way imaginable. We are slavishly addicted to exponential growth and it will be the end of us for ours is a decidedly finite planet with finite, life-sustaining resources that we're racing ever faster to exhaust. We have long ago outgrown our planet, our biosphere. If you don't get that, go back three paragraphs to the one that begins "Proof of the mortal fragility...".

I cringe whenever I come across climate change activists touting renewable, alternative energy as the solution to future growth. What growth? What can they possibly mean except growth in production, growth in consumption and, presumably, even further growth in population? When we're already dependent on consuming far more resources than our planet can provide where do we find the room to grow?

Never in the history of our species has there been such wealth. Yet a lot of the wealth manifested in modern luxury and indulgence has been stolen from the generations who will follow us. We're living large and they'll have to pay for it - socially, economically, environmentally. There's an enormous and ugly price they'll have to bear from the degraded environment we're bequeathing them through our selfishness, gluttony and indifference. Even the great Khan did not pillage the future.

Taking up with Dark Mountain is not, as Monbiot, Klein and others suggest, throwing in the towel on environmentalism. It is not capitulation. Does it negate the fight to salvage the environment? Not at all, far from it. The fact remains that, while we probably can't give our grandchildren much better than a severely degraded environment, we can make it far worse than it need be by our business as usual approach.

The fight - to decarbonize our society and our economy - must go on because the alternative is too horrible to tolerate. The fight, however, must not be allowed to eclipse the greater challenge of which climate change is but a part. That greater fight may already be lost before it even began. The fight that may have slipped through our fingers was the struggle to control and direct the means by which mankind shall be restored to harmony with our environment. It was never more than a fight to mitigate the suffering and dislocation in the transition to Mankind 2.0, the species that will survive to rebuild after our civilization collapses.


It is, it seems, our civilisation’s turn to experience the inrush of the savage and the unseen; our turn to be brought up short by contact with untamed reality. There is a fall coming. We live in an age in which familiar restraints are being kicked away, and foundations snatched from under us. After a quarter century of complacency, in which we were invited to believe in bubbles that would never burst, prices that would never fall, the end of history, the crude repackaging of the triumphalism of Conrad’s Victorian twilight — Hubris has been introduced to Nemesis.

...Increasingly, people are restless. The engineers group themselves into competing teams, but neither side seems to know what to do, and neither seems much different from the other. Around the world, discontent can be heard. The extremists are grinding their knives and moving in as the machine’s coughing and stuttering exposes the inadequacies of the political oligarchies who claimed to have everything in hand. Old gods are rearing their heads, and old answers: revolution, war, ethnic strife. Politics as we have known it totters, like the machine it was built to sustain. In its place could easily arise something more elemental, with a dark heart.

...Even within the prosperous and liberal societies of the West progress has, in many ways, failed to deliver the goods. Today’s generation are demonstrably less content, and consequently less optimistic, than those that went before. They work longer hours, with less security, and less chance of leaving behind the social background into which they were born. They fear crime, social breakdown, overdevelopment, environmental collapse. They do not believe that the future will be better than the past. Individually, they are less constrained by class and convention than their parents or grandparents, but more constrained by law, surveillance, state proscription and personal debt. Their physical health is better, their mental health more fragile. Nobody knows what is coming. Nobody wants to look.


Nobody knows what is coming. Nobody wants to look, indeed. Our prime minister doesn't want to look. He certainly doesn't want anyone else looking. His salvation is that his rivals aren't interested in looking either lest they be caught surveying the obvious. It is perhaps unfair to single out our country's political leadership when it's a universal failing that brings us to the edge and over.


We are the first generations to grow up surrounded by evidence that our attempt to separate ourselves from ‘nature’ has been a grim failure, proof not of our genius but our hubris. The attempt to sever the hand from the body has endangered the ‘progress’ we hold so dear, and it has endangered much of ‘nature’ too. The resulting upheaval underlies the crisis we now face.

We imagined ourselves isolated from the source of our existence. The fallout from this imaginative error is all around us: a quarter of the world’s mammals are threatened with imminent extinction; an acre and a half of rainforest is felled every second; 75% of the world’s fish stocks are on the verge of collapse; humanity consumes [50%] more of the world’s natural ‘products’ than the Earth can replace — a figure predicted to rise to 80% by mid-century. Even through the deadening lens of statistics, we can glimpse the violence to which our myths have driven us.

And over it all looms runaway climate change. Climate change, which threatens to render all human projects irrelevant; which presents us with detailed evidence of our lack of understanding of the world we inhabit while, at the same time, demonstrating that we are still entirely reliant upon it. Climate change, which highlights in painful colour the head-on crash between civilisation and ‘nature’; which makes plain, more effectively than any carefully constructed argument or optimistically defiant protest, how the machine’s need for permanent growth will require us to destroy ourselves in its name. Climate change, which brings home at last our ultimate powerlessness.

...Of all humanity’s delusions of difference, of its separation from and superiority to the living world which surrounds it, one distinction holds up better than most: we may well be the first species capable of effectively eliminating life on Earth. This is a hypothesis we seem intent on putting to the test. We are already responsible for denuding the world of much of its richness, magnificence, beauty, colour and magic, and we show no sign of slowing down. For a very long time, we imagined that ‘nature’ was something that happened elsewhere. The damage we did to it might be regrettable, but needed to be weighed against the benefits here and now. And in the worst case scenario, there would always be some kind of Plan B. Perhaps we would make for the moon, where we could survive in lunar colonies under giant bubbles as we planned our expansion across the galaxy.

But there is no Plan B and the bubble, it turns out, is where we have been living all the while. The bubble is that delusion of isolation under which we have laboured for so long. The bubble has cut us off from life on the only planet we have, or are ever likely to have. The bubble is civilisation.


Dark Mountain is a challenge of imagination. It is to imagine survival and going forward.


This is a moment to ask deep questions and to ask them urgently. All around us, shifts are under way which suggest that our whole way of living is already passing into history. It is time to look for new paths and new stories, ones that can lead us through the end of the world as we know it and out the other side. We suspect that by questioning the foundations of civilisation, the myth of human centrality, our imagined isolation, we may find the beginning of such paths.

Why Is The Harper Regime Surveilling Us?

It's a good question, but unfortunately and predictably, the government is providing us with no answers.

As reported in today's Star,

The federal privacy watchdog’s concerns over electronic snooping are being met with silence from members of Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s cabinet.

Interim Privacy Commissioner Chantal Bernier directly appealed to four cabinet ministers and the federal government’s chief bureaucrat to reform Ottawa’s electronic snooping practices between February and March. Only one cabinet minister, Treasury Board President Tony Clement, has responded to Bernier’s letter.

Meanwhile, a Star reader offers a pungent assessment of how our country has devolved under the Harper regime:

Re: Conservative snooping Orwellian, Letter May 5

I have been musing of late about so many events happening in our beloved country, at the speed of light it seems. One thing sits very uncomfortable with me. Communism was defeated by the progress of democracy and economics in most of the communist countries but here we are in Canada using the very same methods they used to control their citizens — every piece of personal and public information is being scrutinized and stored by threatening the people who provide us our freedom to the world via the Internet and our personal habits of buying, education, business, and so on.

What the hell happened? Democracy where are you?

Carole A. Zaza, Toronto

And finally, this brief video points out some of the things we should be thinking about as the regime continues its unwholesome, undemocratic and wholly unprecedented intrusions into our privacy:

Is Dear Leader Trending Downward?

I certainly hope so:

Digital Peeping Toms: They Don't Even Bother To Hide Anymore

That is certainly the conclusion I drew after reading this morning's latest Star revelation about our overlords in Ottawa. Entitled Ottawa is ‘creeping’ your Facebook, the article by Alex Boutilier reveals yet more unwholesome intrusions into our privacy being conducted by the Harper regime.

In a January report to Parliament, interim privacy commissioner Chantal Bernier raised concerns about accountability in data sweeps of the Internet. She has now expressed those concerns directly in a letter to Treasury Chair Tony Clement:

An "increasing number” of government institutions are collecting publicly available personal information from sites like Facebook and Twitter “without any direct relation to a program or activity.”

“We are seeing evidence that personal information is being collected by government institutions from social media sites without regard for accuracy, currency and accountability,” ...

“Should information culled from these sites be used to make administrative decisions about individuals, it is incumbent upon government institutions to ensure the accuracy of this information; it is not at all clear that this obligation is being, or could be, met.”

Of course, the federal government had a tool for the culling of accurate information. It was called the mandatory long-form census, dismissed by the regime as 'too intrusive.'

So what was Mr. Clement's cavalier responce to these concerns?

“Canadians willingly put onto social media all sorts of information, so it should not be a surprise that corporations, individuals, good guys, bad guys, and governments are collecting the freely available information they put on social media sites,” ...

“This is all publicly available information. People freely make that choice.”

Stepping up his brazen tone, he is quick to reassure us that the regime is quite aware that some of the data they obtain in their digital peeping-tom mode may not be accurate, declaring that

... the government takes into account the unreliability of the data.

“We’re aware of that, so you have to take it with a grain of salt depending on what the information is used for”.

When asked what that use might be, he could offer no concrete examples.

In a belated attempt at damage control, Orwell's Clement's office sent the following to The Star:

“The government of Canada takes the privacy of Canadians very seriously. The Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat is looking into this issue, in collaboration with the office of the privacy commissioner,” spokesperson Heather Domereckyj said in an email.

Doublespeak. Government Surveillance. Enemies of the State. All is in place, and in the twisted ethos of the Harper cabal, all is well. Everyone may now return to their workstations, and please, pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.

UPDATED: Unfit To Govern

I have to admit that even though I am now in my sixties, I have never before witnessed the kind of behaviour on the part of a Canadian government as I have of the Harper regime. Contemptuous of opposing views, ready to vilify opponents at every turn, the regime has taken even me, an inveterate cynic, by surprise in its latest salvo. In a word, Harper's the attack on the Supreme Court is unprecedented in a healthy democracy.

To say that Stephen Harper is mentally unhealthy is to state the obvious. To say that his twisted psyche sees enemies everywhere is not news. What may not be so obvious to the casual observer is the contempt he holds for Canada itself, given his most recent attack on Beverley McLachlin. As other observers have already noted, to call into question, out of mere spite, the probity of the Supreme Court's Chief Justice is to undermine Canadian's faith in our judiciary.

And of course, this follows a long Harper pattern of sowing doubt and disaffection among Canadians toward so many of our country's institutional underpinnings. Harper's disdain for Parliament is legendary, from his marginalizing the opposition to proroguing the House to avoid defeat. The robocall scandal attests to how much the notion of fair elections offends him. The 'Fair' Elections Act is itself a giant middle finger directed at democracy.

In his latest column entitled PM’s enemies list? Here comes the judge, The Globe's Lawrence Martin reflects on the strangeness of Harper's Supreme Court attack:

This is Stephen Harper’s court. He appointed a majority of the justices on it. He named five of the eight, with one more pending. Another, Beverley McLachlin, was named to the court by Tory Brian Mulroney. The Harper appointments, as could be expected, have been more conservative in their orientation than liberal.

Yet these facts have not prevented the Prime Minister from his full frontal assault on the court.

Says Martin:

The Prime Minister’s enemies list, which includes Mr. Cotler and so many others, keeps growing – and reaching higher levels. Must everyone submit to Mr. Harper’s will or face retaliation? Do we have, as his former adviser Tom Flanagan maintains, a predator as prime minister? Does he not think there will be a reckoning?

Harper's much vaunted and exaggerated strategic 'genius' does not seem to be the motivating force here, either. Martin recalls,

... interviewing David Emerson, who had a unique perspective because he served in both the cabinets of Paul Martin and Stephen Harper. There were things he preferred about the Harper operation. But one difference that alarmed Mr. Emerson was the degree of visceral contempt he saw from Mr. Harper and his top lieutenants toward those opposed to their beliefs. He’d never seen anything like it. How could they harbour, he wondered, so much venom?

What goes on in the Prime Minister's head is not realy my concern. All I know is that Stephen Harper and all of his acolytes have betrayed what should have been a sacred trust, the leadership of our country. The country I know and love cannot survive another term of his hateful, divisive and destructive rule.

UPDATE: It would seem that even Conservatives are beginning to see the truth about Mr. Harper:

Can I Get Back To You On That?

Maybe I am just angry because a progressive budget was dismissed by an allegedly progressive party.

Maybe I am fearful that an NDP-induced Ontario election could see the ascension to power of young Tim Hudak ('I've got a plan to create one million jobs!'), who clearly will never be ready for prime-time politics, fixated as he is on recreating the disastrous Harris era that he played a key role in.

Or maybe I am a bit contemptuous that even though she is the one responsible for this election, Andrea Horwath is still indulging in a meteorological assessment (aka testing the political winds) before she takes a stand on issues.

Maybe it is all three, but what set me off this morning was an article Richard Benzie, Rob Ferguson and Richard J. Brennan wrote for this morning's Star. Entitled Ontario election campaign shows lack of readiness, it makes sport of the fact that young Tim chose the wrong venue for his first official appearance, MetalWorks sound studio, where the owner, Gil Moore, avowed his support for a Liberal $45-million funding initiative introduced last year to help the music industry. It is an initiative that Tim, opposed to any such government support for industry ('Lower taxes and they will come!' avers the toothy-grinned young man), voted against.

But from my perspective, the most telling aspects of unreadiness that may or may not reflect on the leadership of Ms. Horwath, are the following:

- the New Democrats still have to appoint candidates in 39 ridings,

- they don’t have a bus for reporters covering them, as is standard

- they don’t yet have a fully formed campaign platform.

It is the latter, however, that I find most vexing and also most emblematic of the party's troubled leadership.

While visiting a Brampton convenience store, Horwath was asked the following:

Will she match the Liberals’ pledge to give $4 hourly raises to personal support workers?

Will her party set up a pension plan for the roughly 65 per cent of workers who don’t have one in the workplace?

Her non-answer essentially amounted to, "I'll have to get back to you on those issues." Refusing to answer, she promised that a full list of NDP campaign promises will emerge as the election unfolds.

Ms Horwath is adamant that the Wynne Liberals cannot be trusted with their promises; by refusing to answer direct questions, I guess the NDP leader is making sure the same cannot be said about her.

Don't Let A Culture Of Defeat Hold You Back

That's right, folks. There are untold opportunities to enhance both your gross domestic product and your wallets through the scourge gift of oil spills, as oil pipeline company Kinder Morgan recently explained. But of course, that 'leftie' Rachel Maddow looks a gift horse in the mouth as she continues to spread her dangerous ideas:

Well-Said

While I may write something of my own later today, the letters in this morning's Star are both incisive and damning of the Harper regime's penchant for insinuating itself into our lives by bribing telecoms and social media to turn over our private date at the rrate of $1 to $3 each. Enjoy:

They are watching you, April 30

Alex Boutilier makes it clear why the telcom companies are so willing, indeed delighted, to cooperate with government spy agencies and deliver up, for just the asking, our private communications for scrutiny. They get paid for it. This is part of their business model, and they profit well from it.

George Orwell, author of “1984” (in 1934), would be so smiling today.

Edward A. Collis, Burlington


You don’t suppose that the bulk of these searches are for information on people who posted Liberal or NDP signs on their lawns during the past federal election? A certain Canadian political party having nothing but an address might want to know the names and telephone numbers of these “enemies of the people” that they might be directed to the wrong polls by the famous “Demon Dialer” during the next vote.

Richard Gibbons, Hamilton


Big Brother's busy friends, Editorial May 1

I thank the Star for highlighting this latest, crucial breach of public trust, and I couldn’t agree more with your editorial. I’ve never felt so hopping mad as I do on learning of this latest, sickeningly brazen violation of the sanctity of private information.

The scale and scope of it is a clarion call to all Canadians, that if we sleep walk through this outrage, we’ll almost certainly have passed the point of no return. We will spiral ever faster downwards into a police and surveillance state, something unthinkable a generation ago. Mr. Harper is either with us or with the dictators and despots. Which is it?

If I were the Leader of the federal Opposition, I would putting this question to the Prime Minister: “Mr. Speaker, there are those among today’s conservatives who feel that if you’ve nothing to hide, you shouldn’t mind the state invading your privacy. By that token, I call on the Prime Minister to cooperate with the federal privacy commissioner and disclose what information on private citizens has been given up by the media companies — and why, and which agencies are now in possession of it — and why. If he and his government have done no wrong, then they’ll also have nothing to hide.”

Ted Nasmith, Bradford


Is it not ironic that a government that claims to be honest, transparent and accountable would lie to us, hide information from us and consistently block the release of information requested in accordance with the Freedom of Information Act?

Is it not ironic to have a majority government that was opposed by 60 per cent of the voters? Is it not ironic that this government’s “fair elections act” completely ignores the current system’s failure to represent the will of the “majority” of citizens?

Is it not ironic that a government so obsessed with its own secrecy and privacy is so anxious to violate the privacy of the public it supposedly serves? Is it not ironic to have the leader of this government present himself as a committed defender of Ukraine’s democracy?

Why would Ukrainians deserve democracy more than us?

Randy Gostlin, Oshawa

Guest Essay From The Mound Of Sound: From Star Wars Back to Verdun

I've been updating my warfare knowledge base lately with a load of independent reading and an online course from the war studies department of King's College, London.

For those who wonder if the 21st century could be as bloody as the 20th was, what with WWI and WWII and all, here's something to ponder. When WWII was over and the dust had settled and we were embarking on Middle Class bliss, the world's population was about 2.5-billion. Today we're already at 7+ billion and steamrollering toward 9-billion or more. Think we haven't got a load of dying to do? Think again.

Foreign Policy magazine has been running a contest you'll only find in magazines like that. Contestants submit essays on "The Future of War" and readers get to vote for their favourites out of the 25-best entries. Here are a few highlights.



US Marine Capt. Jesse Sloman writes that, should America get into another major war, it'll be "lights out." Sloman says an adversary (okay, China) would go straight for America's vaunted but ridiculously vulnerable "full spectrum electronic dominance."

"...on a conventional 21st century battlefield, senior officers will have to re-learn how to conduct operations with communications and intelligence capabilities reminiscent of wars fought a half-century ago. Drones will go blind and crash as their satellite links are severed. Aircraft and ships will get lost when their Global Positioning System (GPS) receivers go dead (and their crews struggle to remember the map and compass skills they were briefly exposed to in basic training). Leaders will struggle to communicate with their subordinate units, leaving perplexed junior officers alone and exposed, with no links to higher command, facing the enemy the way their forefathers did at Belleau Wood, Bastogne, or Hagaru-ri."



Actuary Matt Wilson, author of "A System Collapse Framework for Societies" argues that, from an actuarial standpoint, we're long overdue for a major power (i.e. nuclear) war.

"The future heavily builds on the past -- a positive feedback loop process. All positive feedback processes that are stabilized (not allowed to crash) will experience a very large crash at some point in time. And if a very large crash is still suppressed, then the system (society or earth) will get stuck in the middle of a phase change. When the system finally undergoes a phase change, then everything will get wiped out. What happens when you put out every forest fire? Forests follow the same positive feedback loop process too. In the meantime, the system will sit at the edge of a cliff, unable to move forward very well. This explains Japan's economy and now the U.S. economy too. It also explains the future of war: the large crash.

Time of stability is the biggest factor in determining when a system is nearing a crash state. After a long period of stability, a big problem in one area implies that big problems are lurking elsewhere. The 9/11 shock in 2001 was our first sign of trouble. The 2008 financial crisis pushed the United States into a pre-collapse state that is being suppressed. Like Japan, the United States will not be able to get going again until it allows another great depression. The next shoe to drop could be a great-power nuclear war. Look at the connection between financial crisis and war:


1. The 1907 U.S. financial crisis was followed by World War I in 1914.
2. The 1929 U.S. financial crisis was followed by World War II in 1939.
3. The 2008 U.S. financial crisis was followed by World War III in 2015-2018?

The same build-up of problems that caused a financial crisis also positioned societies for war. Those problems are a build-up of bad ideas, bad decisions, and corruption. They build up within all sectors of society at about the same rate. So the fact that the financial sector is mostly independent of the military sector is irrelevant. A big crisis in one area just tells us that time is up.

You and everyone else you know think that a great-power nuclear war is just about impossible. In fact, it just might be the future of war."



US Air Force Lt. Col. Don Manning sees future American warfighting shaped by the fiascos of Iraq and Afghanistan. The American people and the country's coalition allies have had their fill. In future, America will either go very small (drone warfare) or very, very big.

In the future, U.S. policymakers will continue to feel a responsibility to respond to threats, even if they cannot convincingly articulate those threats to the American people. As a result, policymakers will continue to pursue very small, very limited military interventions where possible. Drone strikes are among the smallest of these interventions, but small footprint, low press interventions such as those currently ongoing in Djibouti, Mali, and the Central African Republic will continue to be palatable.

On the other side of the coin, America could be presented with a threat so obvious and ominous that it cannot be ignored. It is impossible to out-think the irrational, but it is plausible that miscalculation or a mistake might lead to a country like North Korea taking an action sufficiently threatening American interests in the Pacific and forcing a major U.S. response. With nuclear weapons in the mix, you can bet America's most advanced weapon systems will be put to use along with thousands of troops.

America, however, will shun interventions that are neither very small nor very large as policymakers find themselves unable to convince neither the war-weary American public nor its war-weary coalition partners to take on another fight. Any intervention requiring nation- or state-building or without a direct impact on the lives of Americans will be dead on arrival.



Iraq war vet and Yale man, Adrian Bonenberger, believes America will fall victim to its own obsession with big bucks, high-tech weaponry, just like other countries that followed that same path in the past.

We've already fought the war-after-next, and lost. Called "The Millennium Challenge 2002," it was a simulated war game designed to showcase a high-tech, integrated U.S. Navy's ability to crush smaller, less sophisticated foes (widely assumed to be Iran) in the Strait of Hormuz. What happened instead was a simulated disaster: Overwhelmed by hundreds of small groups operating according to pre-established, decentralized directives and empowered to think for themselves, the U.S. side quickly lost an entire aircraft carrier support group, as well as numerous aircraft. The notional enemies used basic radar, primitive cruise missiles, rockets, motorcycle couriers, and strategic initiative to achieve total surprise, following up their initial advantage with another wave of de facto missiles -- explosives-laden motorboats that were too numerous and speedy for the lumbering Navy ships to engage effectively.

Future planners have spent a great deal of time and energy justifying platforms like the F-22, the F-35, and the Navy's Littoral Combat Ship (LCS), claiming that they are necessary to win the next war -- but they've actually been developed to fight some version of World War II.

...According to Lockheed Martin, the company that produces the F-22 Raptor, 195 planes were produced for the Air Force, of which eight were test planes, for a total of 187 operational aircraft. Each plane cost an estimated $150 million. Air Force planners seem confident that these planes can deliver air dominance at "the decisive point" in an air conflict with an enemy of equal or slightly greater strength.

But what if this hypothetical enemy -- China, Russia, some unforeseen alliance from the Middle East or Africa, united under one brutal Hitler or Napoleon's fist -- is planning on sending up 20 inferior planes for each F-22, and 20 inferior tanks to each Abrams? What if we find ourselves in a position of geographical and political isolation, bereft of allies, and facing an alliance of enemies bent on our destruction? Why wouldn't they take this approach -- the very approach we used on the ground against a technologically superior Nazi Germany, sending 15 Sherman tanks against each Tiger they fielded. Why would our future-future enemy face us on equal terms when we're apparently very vulnerable to asymmetrical, low-tech attack?


Major Daniel Sukman writes that America must prepare for warfare conducted in the homeland, something the US hasn't really experienced since the War of 1812. The major sees the need not for the military to become involved in domestic law enforcement but for the law enforcement community to become more militarized.

The U.S. military must form partnerships and work with law enforcement agencies within the United States in the area of protection. This is not a future in which the United States abandons the principle of Posse Comitatus, rather it is a future where law enforcement has a larger and more proactive role in America's conflicts.

War in the homeland is a scary thought. Outside of major terrorist attacks, for the most part the homeland has been secure since the War of 1812. Although we continue to fight the War on Drugs, the War on Poverty, the War on the Middle Class, and the War on Christmas in the homeland, the American Way of War is to play 'away games' against other nations. If we are not careful in the way we pursue unmanned and autonomous systems, that piece of the American Way of War may change forever.



Former Australian diplomat and soldier turned security consultant, Dr. David Kilcullen, foresees a future of zombie wars - wars that we think we have ended that keep returning to life, again and again.

Irregular conflicts tend to be "zombie wars" which keep coming back to life just as we think they're over. Iraq is a case in point: By late 2009, through urban counterinsurgency, partnership with communities, and intensive reconciliation efforts, U.S. forces had severely damaged al Qaeda and brought civilian deaths to the lowest level in years: Only 89 civilians were killed across all of Iraq in December 2009, down from over 1,000 per month in mid-2008, and a shocking 3,000 per week in late 2006. But rapid and complete U.S. withdrawal in 2010 -- combined with sectarian politics and the reinvigoration of al Qaeda through the Syrian war -- pulled the rug from under local communities, reviving a conflict that a succession of U.S. leaders, on both sides of politics, have been incorrectly claiming was over ever since May of 2003. Likewise, in places like Afghanistan, Colombia, Somalia, Congo, the Central African Republic, Mali, and Sudan, current outbreaks are not new -- rather, they're revivals of generations-old conflicts that keep coming back. Colombia's FARC rebel movement, for example, turns 60 in 2014.

...as America and its allies pass -- thankfully -- away from an era of large-scale intervention in overseas counterinsurgencies, it's tempting to think that each year's crop of new irregular wars is just so much background noise that we can afford to ignore. Unfortunately, that's not true anymore, if it ever was: In an increasingly urbanized, massively connected world, where empowered individuals and non-state groups will access communications and weapons technology that used to be the preserve of nation-states and future conflicts will leap international boundaries, we ignore these conflicts at our peril.

One crystal clear lesson for future war emerges from the last decade. This is that unilateral intervention in other people's wars is not the way to go -- and neither is large-scale counterinsurgency which, though doable, is extraordinarily difficult, and far from desirable in humanitarian, financial, or political terms. Interventions, particularly counterinsurgencies, must be an absolute last resort. But ignoring future conflicts doesn't work either -- urban, zombie, irregular crime-wars, that leap national boundaries and feature non-state groups with technology and connectivity only states used to have, will spread rapidly, sucking in surrounding regions, as Syria is doing now, and as Afghanistan did before 9/11.



Finally, doctoral student and former US Army officer, Christopher Davis, says there won't be a future war for the United States, just a perpetual continuation of the war already underway.

Already, the United States has exploited these [autonmous technology] advantages to wage a war without apparent end from the sky against Islamic militants around the globe. No clear end-state can be discerned from the campaign, nor is there any official measurement of the war's progress except abstract statements about successful strikes. International borders are freely ignored and secret agreements are made with "host" governments to minimize their obstruction. These seismic changes were felt with the first generation of drones and robots. What will future generations bring?

The introduction of these weapons on a wider scale is forthcoming. Air Force enthusiasts speaking about the sixth generation of fighter aircraft speculate that it will be pilotless. Special Operations Command is pushing aggressively for new technologies to radically improve the capabilities of its operators. Combined with the insulation of the military from the general public, the relatively free hand of the president in directing foreign policy, the increasing costs of maintaining an all-volunteer military in an age of austerity, and the proliferation of threats in a globalizing multipolar world, AFMs offer the only way forward to answer the national security problems of the future.

Instead of thinking about strategy, we should be thinking about the continuation of the American way of war. This can be addressed through examining the legal and ethical implications of armies constituted in large part by autonomous fighting machines. Does shooting down a drone constitute an act of war? What about crashing it into the ground through a cyberattack? If a semi- or fully autonomous war machine commits a war crime, who is at fault? If the defined operating parameters of an AFM could lead to a war crime, is it a lawful order to program the AFM with those parameters? These questions and more touch the fundamental human component of warfare -- a feature that is increasingly distant from the battlefield.

America has already entered its last war. This war, the war unending, will be fought with ever advancing machines of all kinds. These machines will be increasingly autonomous and they will take commands from insulated bureaucracies with limited public oversight. Policymakers will be less timid about their employment. The foundations for this war have already been set in places like Pakistan, Somalia, and Yemen. As the last Islamist terrorist draws his final breath, against whom will these machines be pointed next?

Who's Sorry Now?

Perhaps NDP leader Andrea Horwath will be, for forcing an unnecessary Ontario election, if the results of a new Forum Research Poll hold throughout the campaign.

The survey of 1,845 people across Ontario, conducted on Friday and Saturday, yielded the following reuslts:

- 48 per cent of respondents approved of the budget. Thirty-two per cent disapproved, and 20 per cent didn’t know.

- 68 per cent approved of the income tax hike for wealthier Ontarians, with just 24 per cent disapproving and 8 per cent with no opinion.

- 39 per cent think Sousa’s spending plan will be bad for the economy while 21 per cent think it will be good, another 21 per cent feel it will have no effect and 19 per cent were unsure.

President Lorne Bozinoff says extrapolating the polling results would see the Liberals winning 49 seats in the 107-member legislature, the Conservatives taking 45, and the NDP holding 13.

Currently, the distribution is 48 Grit MPPs, including Speaker Dave Levac, 37 Tories, 21 New Democrats, and one vacancy.

In other words, the projection gives us another minority government, less seats for the NDP, and an election tab north of $80 million.

Thanks, Andrea, for nothing. Your vanity project does not seem very popular.

Ontario Politics

While I realize that the politics of Ontario is likely not a riveting subject for those living in other jurisdictions, I nonetheless offer this brief post on the election that has been called here for June 12. Given that the Wynne government presented a budget that by anyone's standards would be deemed progressive, the decision of NDP leader Andrea Horwath to 'pull the plug' on this minority government seems wrong and entirely self-serving.

A woman who has proven to be a grave disappointment as her party's leader, Horwath, given to pandering for power at the expense of principle, is voting against a budget that I daresay, based on her performance these past few years, she would be too craven to bring in were she heading the government.

As pointed out by The Star's Thomas Walkom, Wynne has promised to invest heavily in public transit. More important, she has proposed the country’s first serious retirement income scheme since the Canada Pension Plan was brought in almost half a century ago.

Should voters look to the Progressive Conservatives, Tim Hudak has made it clear that if his party wins, he will kill Wynne’s proposed Ontario Retirement Pension Plan, pull back on ambitious infrastructure proposals, and make life miserable for unionized workers.

Like Jack Layton, whose NDP helped bring down the Paul Martin Liberals, thereby paving the way for the Harper regime, will Horwath's decision prove just as fateful for the people of Ontario?

If so, the NDP, if it is to have any possibility of future rehabilitation, will need to find new and principled leadership as soon as possible.

Two Takes On Taxation

The contrast couldn't be more striking. As announced by federal Fiance Minister Joe Oliver the other day, Ottawa is well on its way to posting a $9 billion surplus, but Canadians shouldn’t expect any massive new spending programs. Instead, he plans to reduce taxes once the deficit is eliminated in the 2015-16 budget, likely next winter.

On the other hand, the Ontario government, under Premier Wynne, proposes a host of new spending and moderate tax increases under the budget it brought down yesterday.

Progressive measures include raising the wages of home care workers, more money for infrastructure, welfare hikes, new health benefits for children and a plan to hire at-risk youth in provincially funded infrastructure projects.

Perhaps the boldest proposal is an Ontario Pension Plan that will, years down the road, alleviate a good deal of the poverty faced by retirees who currently don't have company pension plans, it is the same model that the Harper regime rejected as "too risky for our fragile economy."

Two competing visions of the role of government; the federal one, which appeals to the selfishness that resides in all of us, and a provincial one which, albeit an election budget, appeals to our better natures.

Which one will prevail? Who knows? But now might be a good time to watch the following TVO podcast, taken from Alex's Blog, in which Alex Himelfarb talks with Steve Paikin about why taxes should not be considered a four-letter word:

If You Value Your Privacy

Watch. Learn. Share freely.

UPDATED:Are We Feeling Any Outrage Yet?

If we care a scintilla about privacy or any measure of aversion to government snooping into our private business, we damn well should be. As I wrote in yesterday's post, the Harper regime and its complicit agencies, intoxicated with power, have been requesting (sans warrants) and receiving data on us from the major telecoms and social media sites.

Now word comes that these Judases are being paid for their obsequious compliance by our tax dollars:

The Toronto Star reports the following:

Canadian taxpayers are footing the bill for government agencies to buy their private data from telecom companies without their knowledge.

According to parliamentary documents, government agencies pay between $1 and $3 for access to user data from telecom, Internet and social media companies.

Figures released Tuesday by Canada’s privacy watchdog indicate authorities requested that access from nine companies more than 1.19 million times a year, meaning authorities spend in excess of hundreds of thousands of dollars to quietly access Canadians’ personal data.

Read that again. The telecoms et al. are not only betraying us, but they are also being paid through our taxes for that betrayal.

Compounding that sell-out is the fact that these companies are refusing the Privacy Commissioner's request for more information about this foul practice, which Thomas Mulcair yesterday described as an abomination:

Mirko Bibic, Bell Canada’s vice-president of regulatory affairs, told reporters Wednesday evening that companies are unsure how to comply with the federal privacy commissioner’s request that telecoms publicly report how often they co-operate with law enforcement and government agencies.

But Bibic refused to say how common that co-operation is, or how often information is handed over to authorities without judicial oversight.

Such truculent arrogance surely indicates the abject contempt in which they hold us, their customers.

Exactly what could the government do with the data these companies are so blithely turning over?

According to a report from the privacy commissioner, “basic subscriber information” can be used to paint a picture of online activities, including browsing history, membership with organizations, physical locations visited, online services used by the subscriber.

“This information can be sensitive in nature in that it can be used to determine a person’s leanings, with whom they associate, and where they travel, among other things,” the report reads. “What’s more, each of these pieces of information can be used to uncover further information about an individual.”

Of course, defenders of such state intrusion will doubtlessly rely on that old saw, "If you have nothing to hide, why would you worry?

Without question, the time for such innocent and naive proclamations is long past.

UPDATE: Click here if you want to see how the regime and its enablers are 'spinning' this scandal.

In Case Anyone Cares Anymore

Rob Ford has embarrassed both himself and the city he was elected to serve yet again and again.

Is It Irony, Or Is It Hypocrisy?

It may be both. The Harper regime's penchant for withholding information from the public that should be accessible is well-known and well-documented.

As pointed out in this Star article, we are persistently denied access to the information about the dangerous side effects of drugs, how much Canada Post spent on overtime to end last year's backlog, nor how Montreal, Maine & Atlantic Railway, the company implicated in the Lac-Mégantic train disaster, assured Transport Canada it could operate a one-man crew safely.

All of that, as the article makes clear, is merely the proverbial tip of the iceberg.

Unfortunately, the regime's penchant for keeping information concealed does not extend to Canadian citizens' right to privacy; here it is becoming increasing apparent that government wants to know far more about us than is either seemly or proper in a putatively democratic country.

As also reported in The Star,

Government agencies are asking telecoms and social media companies to turn over Canadians’ user data at “jaw-dropping” rates, with nearly 1.2 million requests in 2011 alone.

Which government and law enforcement agencies are requesting the data from the companies remains shrouded in secrecy. And the companies themselves are refusing to disclose further details, according to Canada’s privacy watchdog.

And the most worrisome aspect of this invasion is that most of these are requests, i.e., unaccompanied by warrants. Compounding the matter is that when data is turned over, the telecoms do not inform their customers:

The companies [Bell Rogers, Telus et al] say they don’t inform their customers when their information is turned over to authorities, meaning the vast majority of those customers would have no knowledge of the transaction.

Beyond that, they will not comment further, refusing requests from the Privacy Commissioner to tell her how many times they have handed over private data to the government without a warrant.

That same cone of silence seems to be enveloping the government:

The Department of Public Safety declined an interview request by the Star. Industry Minister James Moore, whose department is responsible for the telecom sector, refused to comment on the story when asked by reporters in the House of Commons.

Unfortunately, there is much worse to come:

Michael Geist, one of Canada’s leading Internet privacy experts .... warns that legislation currently before Parliament will actually expand the number of organizations that can ask telecoms and social media companies to voluntarily hand over their customers’ information, and protect those companies from civil or criminal lawsuits.

“It is a structure that allows for the massive disclosure of personal information with no court oversight whatsoever,” Geist said.

Anyone who is not disturbed by these revelations clearly places far too little value on their privacy and accords far too much faith in the benevolence of a government that has consistently proven itself inimical to the best interests of those it 'serves.'

A Failed Puppet Master?

In a withering assessment of Stephen Harper, that is the conclusion Andrew Coyne seems to draw in his National Post column:

We are so heavily invested, we media types, in the notion of Harper as master strategist, able to see around corners and think seven moves ahead and what not, that we tend not to notice how many times he has been screwing up of late. The sudden and more or less complete rewriting, on the same day as the Supreme Court decision, of the colossally misjudged Fair Elections Act, after weeks of waving off any and all criticism as self-interested or partisan or both? Merely a prudent bid to cut their losses. The unusual public goading of Barack Obama (“a no brainer … won’t take no for an answer… etc”) into making a decision on the Keystone XL pipeline project, six years after it was first proposed? Either a play to the base or a wink to the Republicans or a deliberate raising of the diplomatic stakes, anything but what it looks like: a catastrophic fumbling of a key file.

Indeed, perhaps this is all evidence of a very tired government, running only on the fumes of the hatred, dissension, and division it has sewn since 2006:

Observes Coyne:

It is reckless, not in the style of governments that overread their mandate, but in an aimless, scattershot way. It is partisan, but for no purpose other than stubbornness and tribalism. It will take every fight to the limit, pick fights if none present themselves, with no thought to the consequences of either victory or defeat but seemingly out of sheer bloodlust. Like the proverbial dog chasing the car, it has no idea what it will do when it catches it.

All but the most inveterate ideologues would likely agree that it is well past time for a change.

A Reading Recommendation.

I have a deep respect for Alex Himelfarb, the director of the Glendon School of International and Public Affairs and tireless proponent of responsible, progressive taxation. The latter, as one can well-imagine, likely makes him persona non grata in many circles, but those are likely the same circles that close out responsible thought or discussion on any topics that might threaten to puncture the artificial and insular world they encase themselves in.

It is, of course, easy to take the expedient route, as have politicians like Stephen Harper, Justin Trudeau, and Thomas Mulcair at the federal level, and, here in Ontario, Tim Hudak and Andrea Horwath, all essentially proclaiming the evils of taxation, some more stridently than others, as they promise no tax increases. Clearly, in taking such positions, they are playing to our basest impulses.

Alex Himelfarb refuses to play that game. In his latest reminder of things our political leaders would rather we not contemplate, Without a tax debate, we risk sleepwalking into the future, Alex and his son Jordan present this thesis:

Canadians have a right to know what they’re giving up before celebrating the next round of tax cuts.

The article makes reference to the Himelfarbs' book, Tax Is Not a Four-Letter Word, a collection of essays that explores the tax question; its central purpose is perhaps best expressed here:

In the book we do try to counter the view that taxes are simply a burden from which people must be relieved. Simply, they are the way we pay for things we have decided to do together because we cannot do them at all or as well alone. Our approach has yielded reactions both positive and negative.

And this is the crux of today's Star article as they argue that we cannot have an honest discussion about taxation because we do not have a clear understanding of the relationship between taxes and what they buy:

Two successive parliamentary budget officers, whose job it is to know, admit they cannot get the information they need to determine the costs and consequences of tax and spending cuts. So how are we expected to know? And without information about the trade-offs, how do we make informed democratic decisions?

They argue that without this basic knowledge, we as a society cannot make an informed decision on what constitutes proper taxation:

Whether we’re taxed too much or too little is a perennial debate that now needs rebalancing. It’s all well and good to say that many Canadians want smaller government but that means nothing unless it’s based on some understanding of how this will affect our ability to pursue our shared goals. We ought to know what we’re giving up before we celebrate the next round of tax cuts.

That seems to me to be the crux of the problem we face today as a society. The Harper government would have us believe that the only thing we are giving up when tax rates go down is an unwarranted intrusion of government into our lives. The Himelfarbs argue that if we look beyond the self-serving rhetoric of our political overseers, what we lose in embracing that mentality is something much different and ultimately much more costly to all of us.

This Has Gotta Hurt

Expect the Harper attack machine to ramp up its game:

And Now, A Brief Message From PROPCON

Regurgitation warning: if you have just finished eating, wait at least 30 minutes before watching this latest episode of 24/seven, brought to you by PROPCON, the Harper regime's official channel of indoctrination.

I have to admit this is the first episode I have watched; it made me nostalgic for the old Soviet cult-of-personality newsreels. It also gave me increased empathy for what the North Korean people have had to endure under their Dear Leader:




Come to think of it, perhaps our Dear Leader took some instruction from this fellow:

Less Than Meets The Eye

Were average citizens given to much political reflection, they would realize that from start to finish, the 'Fair' Elections Act has been almost exclusively about both discouraging people from voting and suppressing the vote of those who do not fit the Conservative Party's target 'audience.' Even in light of yesterday's announced amendments, that remains the case.

While the Act has provoked a flurry of steady, relentless, critical coverage, both in mainstream and social media, to view yesterday's ostensible retreat as a real victory is to misread the situation badly. Two aspects of the bill will, I think, support my thesis.

First, and less contentious in the public's mind, is the fact that the Chief Electoral Officer is still fettered when it comes to encouraging people to vote. To be sure, the amendment is less Draconian than the Harper regime originally sought:

In the original draft, Bill C-23 restricted the CEO to communicating only where, when and how to vote, raising concerns of an attempt to muzzle the independent agency.

Elections Canada advertising would still be limited to the nuts and bolts of the voting process, but the agency could continue to fund third-party education campaigns with elementary and secondary school students.

In other words, the CEO is still limited to encouraging people who can't vote (elementary and most high school students) to vote. While that may or may not bolster future civic participation, it does nothing to prompt those of voting age to attend the polls.

Secondly, the issue that received the bulk of media criticism, vouching for those without an ID with an address, continues to be a problem.

First, a slight digression. As you will recall, Pierre Poilivre et al. have consistently ruled out the use of voter information cards as an acceptable proof of address. The argument, proven repeatedly to be specious, was that it contributed to voter fraud in past elections.

But think about it for a moment. As a voter, you present valid identification, such as your birth certificate or health card, and then attempt to use a voter information card to establish your address. The card is rejected because you could be perpetrating a fraud. How? Well, even though you have proven who you are, you might have moved into another riding, but you might have also gone to your old address, either broken into your old mailbox or house to retrieve the card, with the express purpose of deceiving Elections Canada.

Sound ridiculous? Of course it does.

But not to Mr. Poilivre and the rest of the cabal.

Like a dog that is regularly beaten by its cruel owner but is ever so grateful when that master/mistress gives it a few crumbs from the table, we are supposed to be ever so thankful for the following:

“The government will not support amendments to allow voting without a piece of identity,” Poilievre said in a press conference on Parliament Hill.

“(But) if someone’s ID does not have an address on it, they will have to sign a written oath of residence. Another voter with fully proven ID will need to co-sign attesting to that voter’s address.”

In other words, the voter is infantilized because he or she, lacking proof, not of identity but of address, must be in the company of an 'adult' who has the proper accreditation. Perhaps someone can explain to me how that does not just continue, in a slightly diluted form, the process of voter suppression of the young, the elderly or the homeless who may not be able to secure the proper accompaniment to the polls.

Watch the following video, as the oleaginous Minister of Democratic Reform tap dances around the truth of this bill. Unfortunately, his interlocutor, Rosie Barton, seems more interested in playing 'gotcha' than uncovering the truth about these very weak and very disappointing amendments. Start at the 10-minute mark:

Are You A Birdbrain?

Watch this video to the end, and you will realize the question is not intended as an insult:

Everyone's A Politician

At least that might seem to be a reasonable inference to draw given people's increasing capacity not to answer questions that make them uncomfortable or expose a weakness in their position.

I have listened to Dan Kelly, President of the Canadian Federation of Independent Business, twice recently. Like a politician, he keeps 'on-message' with something that approaches either Pavlovian or messianic proportions. Watch the following brief clip as he talks about the virtues of the Temporary Foreign Workers Program; note how he operates when Don Martin asks what seems to be an eminently reasonable question:

Political Ambition And Public Outrage

The interesting thing about political ambition and public outrage is that sometimes they work synergistically to produce positive results. Jason Kenney, whose ambition to become the Conservative Party's next leader have been widely rumoured, announced yesterday that fast food restaurants are being suspended from participation in the Temporary Foreign Workers Program after increasingly bad publicity over its misuse, resulting in higher rates of unemployment among Canadian citizens.

The following short video discusses a report from the CD Howe Institute which uncovered this disturbing fact:

However, how much of this is simply a temporary sop to the masses remains to be seen. Although McDonald's moved just prior to Kenney's announcement to suspend its use of temporary foreign workers, as the video below shows, its Canadian CEO, John Betts, regards the entire imbroglio as 'bullshit.'

Will this ban become permanent? The cynic in me suggests it won't, given that the program as administered by the Harper regime has become yet another way of assisting its corporate friends by distorting the labour market, enabling the industry to avoid paying its employees what the market demands.

However, should both the media and the public continue to be interested in the issue, perhaps a permanent solution will emerge. A big IF.