Harperland As Seen By Editorial Cartoonists

H/t ipolitics

Our Baby-In Chief Strikes Again

It doesn't take a degree in psychology to know that Stephen Harper has, as they say, issues. His obsessive secrecy, reported emotional volatility, deep vindictiveness and completely ruthless dispatch of those who represent perspectives, policies and values differing from his own are all markers of a deeply disturbed individual. That he is Canada's prime minister is a national tragedy.

The latest instance of his lashing out, his puppet finance minister's public denunciation of Ontario's plan to establish its own Retirement Pension Plan, is yet another prime example of his unfitness to govern. Martin Regg Cohn writes,

People of goodwill can disagree. But why does a prime minister of ill will have to be so willfully disagreeable, so reflexively destructive, when playing electoral politics?

Stephen Harper’s pettiness in trying to sabotage Ontario’s legitimate efforts to create a public pension for middle-income workers sets a new low in gamesmanship. It will only take money out of the pockets of workers, taxpayers and employers who will be forced to pay higher fees because of the federal intransigence.

The establishment of the plan, upon which Ontario premier Kathleen Wynne campaigned, is a response to the refusal of the federal government to expand the Canada Pension Plan, which most provinces desire to see happen.

Harper’s decision this week to stab Ontario in the back — and middle-class Ontarians in the front — may go down as one of the most offensive, retrograde and thoughtless blunders ever committed by a sitting prime minister plotting his re-election on the backs of prospective pensioners.

His Conservative government is toying with the futures of young people who face a lifetime of precarious employment without proper pension coverage. Ontario’s plan is being designed by some of Canada’s foremost pension experts as a cost-effective, low-fee program that parallels the successful Canada Pension Plan.

Here's what minion Joe Oliver leaked to the public before sending to Ontario:

“The Ontario Government’s proposed ORPP would take money from workers and their families, kill jobs, and damage the economy,” Oliver writes with fatuous hyperbole in the undated letter leaked to the media before it was even transmitted to Queen’s Park.

As Regg Cohn tartly observes, this rejection is conspicuously absent of any research or statistics to back up his shrill dismissal. And to compound the insult, the feds are refusing to make any legislative changes to facilitate the Ontario pension:

Astonishingly, the Harper government will refuse to collect pension deductions on Ontario’s behalf or provide any information to assist the plan — services for which it would have been fairly compensated by the province. In short, it’s not merely a hands-off attitude but a hands-to-the throat approach.

The result of the PM’s partisan tantrum? Higher accounting and compliance costs for business, and additional government funding made necessary by the same federal Tories who always claim to be reducing red tape and cutting waste.

There appears to be only one solution for a prime minister who seems to have a temperament that never grew beyond the 'terrible twos' - isolate him from any further contact with the electorate by tossing him and his playmates out of their playpen in October.

Change Is Coming To Cuba, Not All Of It Necessarily Good

Readers of this blog will know that I have a special affection for Cuba, having visited it many times and gotten to know, to some extent, the 'real' Cuba. Yet it would be wrong for me or any other non-Cuban to pontificate about what is best for the country, given the changes that are coming due to its increasing normalization with the United States. The course of Cuba's future has to be decided by Cuba itself.

Nonetheless, one hopes that the ecological balance highlighted in the following will continue well into the future, despite what will undoubtedly be an onslaught of American tourism:

UPDATE: Why Isn't This Getting Wider Coverage?

While this story seems most timely and relevant, given the ongoing Council of the Federation meeting discussing pipeline growth, I couldn't even find a reference to it in this morning's Toronto Star. It should be front-page news.







UPDATE: Here is a live update from Nexen. One of the most interesting revelations is that the pipeline responsible for the spill is brand new, set up in 2014.

Our World - The Illustrated Version

Sometimes, words only muddy the message, so I'll let the following speak for themselves:









H/t Felipe TeTz

Kill The Messengers

For those of us who follow Canadian politics closely, Mark Bourrie's scathing chronicle of the Harper years, Kill the Messengers, perhaps offers few things that we don't already know. Nonetheless, to have a comprehensive written record of the myriad abuses of democracy, transparency, openness and free expression is an unsettling reminder of how much Canada has suffered and lost under the Harper regime. On that basis alone I strongly recommend the book.

Now more than halfway through it (I read it in measured amounts out of respect for my mental health), each chapter yields much that is worth reflecting on and writing about. However, since yesterday's post dealt in part about Harper's utter disdain for war vets, a disdain he attempts to conceal through his lofty rhetoric about "our brave men and women in uniform," I offer the following excerpt from the book dealing with Lt.-Col Pat Stogran, who says,

"It is beyond my comprehension how the system could knowingly deny so many of our veterans the rights and benefits that the people and the government of Canada recognized a long, long time ago as being their obligation to provide.'

Hired in 2007 as Canada's first veterans ombudsman, Stogran lost his job in 2010 for criticizing Harper and then Veterans Affairs Minister Julian Fantino for the way vets are treated.

Stogran, a combat veteran in the Princess Patricia's Canadian Light Infantry in Afghanistan who suffered post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) from his experiences in the Balkans in the 1990s, knew well the problems that veterans face and wanted to be a fierce advocate for them and hence his interest in the position. Terminating him was not the finest strategic move on the part of the Harper regime:

Firing Stogran didn't shut him up: he immediately became a vocal critic of the government, saying it was not living up to its obligations and promises. He says that the administrators of the veterans' pension program had a "penny pinching insurance company mentality."

We started to put pressure on. They basically told me to pound salt. It became clear they weren't going to co-operate. It was a waiting game for me to leave . . . My ministers were as thick as three short planks. They were completely dependent on their deputy minister. Julian Fantino is a classic example. He's one of Harper's yes men who says the government is backing vets and is pouring money into programs to help them. At the same time, you have federal government lawyers saying in British Columbia that the government has no legal or moral obligation to the veterans. I argued against the lump sum. I said it was wrong to give people who were physically and emotionally traumatized a lump sum of money and then tell them 'have a good day.' Harper never did anything to back me up ... I despise Harper personally. He's pushed politics to another level."

Compounding the injustice of his dismissal is Stogan's belief that his medical records were improperly accessed:

In 2010 he applied to the privacy commissioner to find out why his Veterans Affairs file had been accessed hundreds of times.

The experiences of the erstwhile veterans ombudsman is but a small example of the nature of the Harper regime, serving as a pungent reminder of its intolerance of any dissent or criticism. I can only hope that voters in October roundly express their own intolerance of this repressive regime by casting it out of the office it is so manifestly unfit to hold.

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.