Unfriendly Fire

One hopes and expects that veterans have long memories; if they do, the Harper regime will find their lies catching up with them.

A new campaign, entitled Vote To Stop The Cuts, has been launched by the Public Service Alliance of Canada, its aim to put the Harper record under scrutiny with facts that even the most seasoned spinmaster might find hard to counter. Consider this damning information about Veterans Affairs:

- In 2013 and 2014, the Conservative government closed nine Veterans affairs offices across Canada – in Corner Brook, Charlottetown, Sydney, Thunder Bay, Windsor, Brandon, Saskatoon, Prince George and Kelowna. Total served by affected offices = approximately 21, 432.

- Total value of cuts to Veterans Affairs Canada as of 2015: $113.7 million

- From 2011–12 to the current 2014–15 budget year, the Veterans Affairs staff has been cut by 24% with an additional 1% cut planned by 2016–17. The majority of these jobs were front-line positions.

- The department now has the smallest workforce since before the war in Afghanistan.

- Veterans Affairs offices are now so short-staffed that there is a backlog of 6 to 8 months in providing requested services to veterans. 1 in 5 veterans suffering from a mental illness has to wait more than 8 months before their requests for help are answered.

The genius of the campaign is that it is framed in such a way to show that ordinary Canadians are also falling victim to the parsimonious practices of the current regime, making it much harder to dismiss it as simply an effort by public servants to save their own jobs. In addition to the plight of veterans, it offers up facts on cuts to border security, environmental protection, employment insurance eligibility, public search and rescue capabilities and Canada's food safety.

This video offers an overview:



The site also has downloadable posters to help spread the word on these issues. In my view, it is incumbent upon all of us who yearn for a better Canada, a Canada free of the lies, distortions and myriad failures of the Harper regime, to help promote this and other efforts to ensure that October marks the month when our country begins what will undoubtedly be a lengthy but long overdue rehabilitation.

Back To Business As Usual?

After all of the feel-good rhetoric of the Climate Summit of the Americas, held last week in Toronto, it would appear that we are back to business as usual, at least in Canada.

The Globe and Mail reports the following:

Canada’s premiers are poised to sign an agreement to fast-track new oil sands pipelines while watering down commitments to fight climate change.

The Canadian Energy Strategy will be finalized and unveiled at a premiers’ conference in St. John’s beginning Wednesday.

While it appears that the political will to facilitate the flow of tarsands oil is strong, a commitment to mitigating climate change is not:

Two sections of the plan commit the provinces and territories to help get more pipelines built, in part by cutting down on red tape to speed up regulatory decisions.

But the strategy contains little firm commitment on battling global warming. Its strongest environmental section – a pledge for all provinces and territories to adopt absolute targets for cutting greenhouse gases – is marked as a point of contention that might be scrapped.

There is vague environmental rhetoric peppered throughout the draft strategy, but no binding promises on exactly what the provinces and territories will do to fight climate change – only a general pledge to “transition to a lower carbon economy.” One section, for instance, lists a series of possible climate-change policies, including carbon capture and carbon pricing, but does not appear to require that provinces and territories do any of them.

The obvious contradiction between expanding pipelines and lowering greenhouse gas emissions is one of those pesky details that our provincial political leaders seem happy to ignore:

There is also no explanation on how oil-sands production can expand – a likely scenario if more pipelines are built – while the country still reduces greenhouse gas emissions.

Well, of course this is an obvious explanation, isn't there: egregious contempt for the suffering more and more people will experience as the world continues to warm, and lavish cossetting of those who stand to profit the most from the continued burning of fossil fuels, a truth that no political rhetoric, no matter how skillfully spun, will be able to conceal for very long.

If You Know Some Young Potential Voters

Please send them this


so that we can have less of this


and this

in the future.

A Pat Robertson Rival

Does Todd Starnes have what it takes to unseat Pastor Pat for most unhinged evangelical? You decide:



Can you give me a big Amen?

The Muslim Threat To Stephen Harper

Were I of the Muslim faith, I suspect I would have a deep and abiding contempt for Stephen Harper and his cabal. After all, he is the prime minister who has made Islamophobia a centrepiece of his re-election hopes and, unlike other groups that he has vilified for political gain, has persistently portrayed the religion as a hotbed of terrorism, so much so that repressive measures that threaten the very foundations of Canadian democracy are now ensconced in the legislation known as Bill C-51.

What is a self-respecting Muslim to do?

One answer, it seems, is to encourage one's coreligionists to vote.

Groups like Canadian Muslim Vote (CMV) and the Canadian Arab Institute (CAI) have launched major campaigns to try and pull the Muslim vote.

These groups are trying to circumvent the potential for political sectarianism by staying away from addressing specific issues and by maintaining a strict standard of non-partisanship.

In other words, they simply want the Muslims, who don't have the best voter turnout, to vote—regardless of their political taste.

It would seem that the key lies in younger generations of Muslims, those born here who see themselves as part of the Canadian fabric and are deeply disturbed by the Harper demagoguery that labels them as 'the other' and potential terrorists. Yet the venue for discussing and addressing their frustrations is not likely to be found in the mosques for a number of reasons.

Much of this is due to the political climate in Harper's Canada, which is characterized at least in part by the chilling of political speech within an atmosphere of fear.

Mosques often have charitable status, which can often be stripped away if Muslim leaders decide to take up certain political causes in ways the administration finds distasteful.

The Harper government's appetite for auditing and disrupting organizations that it differs with ideologically is well-known.

Fortunately, alternative venues are developing:

Groups like the National Council of Canadian Muslims (NCCM) have broken through the mainstream in an effort to improve the portrayal and treatment of Muslims in the public sphere.

Their nationwide campaigns have attracted Muslim youth to build similar structures of civic and political engagement.

Dawanet, an influential Muslim organization based out of Mississauga, Ont., just launched an initiative called Project Civic Engagement earlier this summer, aimed primarily at addressing Muslim political engagement and the influence of Islamophobia on Canadian politics.

Winnipeg's own Islamic Social Services Association (ISSA) has also launched public awareness campaigns in an effort to dispel myths surrounding Muslims in the Harper era.

Whether the Muslim vote will turn out to be a formidable influence in the upcoming election remains to be seen. But like other Canadians busy building coalitions to prompt greater voter engagement, any increase in participation can only contribute to an ultimately stronger and healthier democracy in Canada.

The Art Of Misdirection

Some, I guess, are better at it than others.

Who Can I Trust?

Regular readers of this blog will know that I am an enthusiastic supporter of The Toronto Star. The paper's investigative reports, like no others, have had real impact, influencing decisions at the highest levels of power locally, provincially and federally; its dogged pursuit of the truth has always impressed me deeply. The Star has consistetly demonstrated and embodied the role good journalism plays in a healthy democracy.

And yet now there are disturbing allegations by journalist Paul Watson, allegations so serious that the veteran reporter has resigned from the paper. While many of the details are far from clear, The Star, which denies all of his assertions, certainly appears to have acted very oddly.

An extensive interview conducted by Jesse Brown at Canadaland reveals that Watson, who had been on the lead exploration ship, CCGS Sir Wilfrid Laurier, last September and wrote a series of articles on the expedition that found the Franklin flagship the HMS Erebus, was stymied by his editors when he was investigating the exaggerated role accorded to the Royal Canadian Geographic Society and its CEO, John Geiger:

So there was a [media] blackout [after the discovery] of roughly two days, could’ve been three. Remember, I was on the lead vessel in this successful search last September, the Coast Guard icebreaker. I was living with and working beside the experts who were searching for these ships. And because of that blackout, a person who’s the CEO of the Royal Canadian Geographical Society (RCGS) - a former Globe and Mail Editorial Board Chief - a journalist - was able to step into that power vacuum and answer journalists' questions in a way that I immediately saw people [involved with the effort] react to in a way that made them deeply angry because they believed that he was distorting facts, stating untruths and ruining the historical record that they were working so hard to create. And that was just a moment way back in September.

A variety of distortion and untruths emerged, so much so that Jim Basillie attempted to intervene, as reported in The Globe:

In late April, philanthropist Jim Balsillie, whose Arctic Research Foundation was instrumental in the search, sent a letter to Leona Aglukkaq, the Minister of the Environment, saying he was “troubled that Canadian history is not being presented accurately” in a documentary that aired on CBC’s The Nature of Things that month. He was upset that the program “creates new and exaggerated narratives for the exclusive benefit of the Royal Canadian Geographic Society.”

Mr. Balsillie said he was dispirited that the Prime Minister and public agencies seemed to take a back seat. “Government partners, in particular the Government of Nunavut, Canadian Hydrographic Service and the Canadian Coast Guard are shown as supporting players to RCGS and [the Russian vessel] Akademik Sergey Vavilov when the opposite is true.”

Apparently, for reasons that are not yet clear, the Harper government ignored the letter and made no effort to correct the historical record.

The trouble for Watson started when he attempted to question Geiger, who was awarded a Polar Medal for what Governor-General David Johnston’s office called his “essential role in the success of the 2014 Victoria Strait Expedition” and who, according to Watson,

has access to the Prime Minister’s office .... [has] been photographed in close situations around campfires in the Arctic with Stephen Harper ... [and] has political connections.

Within three hours of sending an email to Geiger, Watson was contacted late at night by a Star editor who wanted to know hat he was working on. Fearing Geiger might be tipped off as to the kinds of questions he wanted to ask him, Watson revealed little to the editor, a decision that ultimately led to a 'six-week reporting ban.'

There is much more to the story that is discussed in the Canadaland interview. But for me, what makes it so significant are its implications, implications so severe that Watson resigned his position. Here are his own words to explain what is at stake:

The people who’ve been looking for these ships, they’re really hardworking federal civil servants, archeologists and others who know the truth of how those ships were found and had every right to tell that truth themselves. But because of the country we live in, and because of the government we live under, that message could only come from Prime Minister Stephen Harper himself.

There is an open fear in our federal civil service and I’m sure it applies to other capitals across the country as this phenomenon grows and our democracy weakens. There is a fear among these civil servants that if they stand up and tell the truth, that they will lose their jobs because the politically connected have more power than the truth.

This is a symptom of a broader disease that is eating away at the core of our democracy. Experts on climate, on medicine, on things that are central to our society are being silenced by a government that does favours for the politically connected. And that is just very dangerous for our future.

That, more than anything else, should make this a story worth following.