Human Rights Watch Says Bill C-51 Violates Charter Of Rights

How can it be that everyone else is wrong, and the Harper regime alone holds the truth about the necessity of Bill C-51 to keep us safe?

Now Here's An Unsettling Revelation

Apparently molestation runs rampant in the homes of the Christian Right:



Could there be something wrong in their theology?

Connecting The Dots?

Here in Ontario, Premier Kathleen Wynne's decision to sell off 60% of Hydro One, the very profitable public utility that generated a pre-tax income of $803 million in 2013, is causing quite a storm of outrage. Despite her promise to put all profits from the sale toward transportation structure, the fact that the sale will yield a mere $4 billion after taxpayer money pays off Hydro's long-standing debt means the sale makes almost no sense. And, one might ask, why a sale of 60%, a proportion that will put hydro squarely in private sector's control?

Operation Maple has put up an interesting video that comes to some intriguing, although rather conspiratorial, conclusions. But surely such is preferable to the bovine passivity that government counts on when imposing its will on its citizens, isn't it?



Meanwhile, Toronto Star letter-writers do their usual excellent job in the critical-thinking department. Here are but a few examples:

Sell-off will help Ontario, Hydro One, Letter June 2

The government surely disagrees with Keith Summer’s excellent May 2 opinion piece, but Minister of Energy Bob Chiarelli’s letter fails to say why. Instead of numerical analysis, all we get is the usual political bafflegab. Boiled down, the minister asks us to trust them. Well, count me out.

Apparently, a valuation of Hydro One has been worked out. I assume this valuation is a report of some kind, with validated numerical analysis. Has it been made public? If not public, has it been made available for scrutiny by reputable independent reviewers? Ontarians deserve this. When there is such a major policy change about the ownership of this vital utility, we all should demand a full revelation of the method and results of the valuation process.

The non-sequiturs in Mr. Chiarelli’s letters confound and astound me. He speaks of a 10 per cent maximum ownership causing shares to be broadly held across Ontario in the same sentence. How does that work? How does any aspect of the sale enable Hydro One to become more innovative, competitive and effective as he claims? It’s just silly to make such claims without any proof or rationale.

This deal is bad policy and Mr. Chiarelli should be admonished for writing such a trivial letter.

Edward Kilner, Mississauga

Minister of Energy Bob Chiarelli repeated the term “much needed infrastructure” four times in his letter to the Star.

Ending his letter he left the impression that selling off 60 per cent of Hydro One “will create more than 110,000 jobs each year and help grow our economy,” without costing the taxpayers any money. But selling off part of Hydro One is not going to create one new job. These jobs for the “much needed infrastructure” are already there and have been sitting on the sidelines for years.

To suggest it will not cost the taxpayers any money reminds of the story of the investor who wanted to open a mink farm. He reasoned since mice multiplied five times faster than mink he could feed the mice to the mink and the mink carcasses to the mice and get the pelts for nothing. It sounded good on paper but as time went on he had to go to the well for more money.

Frank Feeley, Fonthill

After reading Keith M. Summers’ commentary I am more than ever convinced that the Ontario government should retain 100 per cent ownership of Hydro One, with all its healthy profits going into the public coffers rather than private pockets. But if it is in fact impossible for the government to borrow $9 billion at a reasonable rate then it should at least follow Mr. Summers’ advice and focus on raising $9 billion by offering approximately 30 per cent equity in Hydro One, retaining majority ownership and a much healthier percentage of the profits.

Gillian Marwick, Toronto

... Your Young Men Will See Visions, Your Old Men Will Dream Dreams.

Although far from a biblical scholar, I find the above line, taken from the Book of Acts, to be an apt title. Even though I am taking it out of context, it encapsulates for me a capacity that the world in general, and Canada in particular, has lost: the capacity to dream of and envisage a better reality than what we have settled for.

Under the relentless barrage of neoconservative propaganda, we have succumbed to the kind of existence epitomized in the video I posted the other day, a world of mindless consumerism, relentless environmental despoliation, and spiritual barrenness. if they are good at anything, those of the reactionary right are very good at limiting, even destroying hope.

Consider the insidious narratives they spin - government as an impediment, government as a thief in your tax pocket, government as the obstruction without which all would be well. Like all effective narratives, each chapter of theirs may contain an element of truth, but only a small part of the truth.

Forgotten is the role that government plays for the collective good, without which all of us would be lost. Imagine no libraries, no public roads, no health care, no pensions, no labour laws, no public police or fire services - all the logical conclusions to the extreme right-wing dream, a dream that would be a nightmare for the vast majority of us, especially those without the means or the wherewithal to escape consignment to the trash heap - economic Darwinianism run amok.

But from those vying for our electoral support, where are the visions, where are the dreams? From Stephen Harper, of course we get the above vision. Justin Trudeau offers more money for families, and a 'new way of doing politics,' whatever that means, and a bit of tinkering around the edges. Thomas Mulcair promises a national daycare program and more money for municipalities, important bread and butter issues, to be sure, but singularly uninspiring and pedestrian, and, to be quite blunt, safe.

Bold initiatives that require more from us via taxes have become verboten, thanks to the narrative the media brings us. So neither Thomas Mulcair nor Justin Trudeau will suggest, for example, a national pharmacare system that would ultimately save everyone, including government and private health plans, huge sums of money (upwards of $12 billion annually) through pooled purchases and far less hospitalizations owing to people either not getting their prescriptions filled or not taking the required dosages in order to stretch out their costly medicationss.

I could go on, but I think you get my point. I have made no reference to the truly critical issues confronting us for an obvious reason. If our leadership is too timid to address matters that are well within reach, such as pharmacare, what likelihood beyond a bit of rhetorical toe-dipping is there of bold measures to remediate child poverty, homelessness and our greatest threat, climate change?

Zero to nil, would be my guess.

About Those Soulless Animals

I dunno. They sure seem to be having a lot of fun. How much do we really know about the interior life of animals?


H/t The Pet Collective

Do you think they might have something to teach us?

A Response From The Mound Of Sound

The Mound of Sound, who knows a great deal about the topic, offered the following response to my post on our hubris and our folly.

Thanks for posting that video, Lorne. Any species that cannot live in harmony with its environment, that even comes to dominate and overwhelm its environment is inherently parasitic and self-extinguishing. We've done this before on a smaller scale time and again. The Mayans, the Easter Islanders, the Mesopotamians - civilizations that come off the land, organize and rise to a peak before suddenly collapsing.

The seeds of our collapse are found in our inability to get beyond 18th century economics, 19th century industrialism and 20th century geopolitics. We're more afraid of abandoning our slavish pursuit of perpetual, exponential growth than the far worse outcome that's inevitable in our success. Where this ends is a matter of mathematical certainty. We're consuming Earth's resources at more than 1.5 times the planet's carrying capacity and our voraciousness is accelerating. It's a dependency more powerful than heroin or crystal meth and far more lethal. Like a chronic junkie we're prepared to live in our ever worsening filth. Rivers that no longer flow to the sea, freshwater no longer fit for human consumption, oceanic dead zones, fish stock collapses, a fouled atmosphere even to the polar regions where black soot darkens the ice caps, aquifers running on empty but, as this video shows, it doesn't matter when your reality is refreshed daily on some electronic screen.

We've been conditioned, Lorne, powerfully conditioned to be fearful and complacent and, especially, to recoil at the notion of change. We've become the vivisectionist's dog, lovingly licking the master's hand while the other hand holds the scalpel plunged into us.

Our Hubris And Our Folly

This is far too true and almost too sad for words: