When the provincial government in British Columbia announced plans to contract out the billing of its health care insurance premiums to an American company, there was enough concern expressed about the potential effects of the PATRIOT Act that BC's Privacy Commissioner was asked to report on the matter. He has.
Canadians' personal information cannot be protected from the prying eyes of U.S. intelligence agents if it's handled by American firms, a new report says.In a long-awaited review of the USA Patriot Act, British Columbia Privacy Commissioner David Loukidelis yesterday called for a toughening of laws "to address risks posed by transfers of personal information" from Canada to the U.S.
"Our research and analysis led us to the conclusion that the USA Patriot Act knows no borders," the commissioner told a news conference in Victoria.
And, until a deal is reached between Ottawa and Washington to ensure privacy is protected, he said the B.C. government should delay plans to contract out to a U.S. company the billing of its Medical Services Plan health-care insurance premiums.
And when I complained in the past that Anne McLellan was way too eager to assure Tom Ridge that he could have access to anything he wanted, you probably thought I was being paranoid.
So how did the BC government react to the news?
But B.C. Management Services Minister Joyce Murray said the government will push ahead...
Back in April the Toronto Star broke the story that the four major players in the Canadian cell phone market appeared to be in collusion on what they were all referring to as a "system access fee", a $6.95 fee added to every monthly cell phone bill. The telcos were claiming it was a mandatory, government-imposed fee when in fact it was nothing of the kind and going straight to the companies' bottom lines.
When I blogged the original story I suggested that perhaps we needed stronger anti-trust laws. While I'm unable to report any progress in that direction, I can certainly report progress of a different kind via CTV News.
Canada's four biggest cellphone carriers could lose their operating licences if a new class-action lawsuit proves they've misled customers about an add-on fee.A class action suit has been filed naming CTV's parent company Bell, as well as Rogers, Telus and Fido operator Microcell. It alleges the carriers' monthly $7 "system access" fee is illegal.
... the suit claims customers are being misled by companies claiming the fee is a mandatory stipend collected on the federal government's behalf. The fee is, in fact, an industry creation not required by Ottawa, the suit claims.
The carriers now risk breaching their licences if caught describing the fee as a mandatory government charge.
...
All four carriers said the suit, which was filed in Saskatchewan on Aug. 9, has yet to be certified.
One of the ongoing sources of cynicism during Jean Chrétien's reign time in office was the way that the outcome of any accusations of ministerial misconduct or conflict of interest seemed to be a foregone conclusion. There's a reason I referred to the former Ethics Counsellor as Howard "The Human Rubber Stamp" Wilson.
When PM the PM took over there was a lot of talk about transparency and a new day dawning. These matters would be taken seriously. Whistleblowers would be protected and wrongdoing would be properly investigated and exposed. The future's so bright you gotta wear shades, eh. It was in that context that the position of Ethics Commissioner was created and one Bernard Shapiro was appointed to the job.
Polunatic's been doing some digging and has a post up that suggests you don't need to run out and buy those new Raybans just yet. Go read. Then contemplate the distinct possibility that we've traded one ethics watchdog who panders to power for another.
Mickey Herskowitz is a long time author and journalist who specializes in "as told to" biographies. In other words he's a ghost writer. He was originally hired to perform that task on George Bush's campaign biography A Charge To Keep but he was eventually dropped from the project because the campaign didn't like his work. It seems he insisted on presenting an accurate reflection of events and reporting things that Bush actually told him. Karen Hughes eventually finished the book herself.
This information comes by way of a story at guerrilla news network (via, appropriately enough, Suburban Guerrilla) and there's more where that came from.
Two years before the September 11 attacks, presidential candidate George W. Bush was already talking privately about the political benefits of attacking Iraq, according to his former ghost writer, who held many conversations with then-Texas Governor Bush in preparation for a planned autobiography.?He was thinking about invading Iraq in 1999,? said author and journalist Mickey Herskowitz. ?It was on his mind. He said to me: ?One of the keys to being seen as a great leader is to be seen as a commander-in-chief.? And he said, ?My father had all this political capital built up when he drove the Iraqis out of Kuwait and he wasted it.? He said, ?If I have a chance to invade?.if I had that much capital, I?m not going to waste it. I?m going to get everything passed that I want to get passed and I?m going to have a successful presidency.?
...
That President Bush and his advisers had Iraq on their minds long before weapons inspectors had finished their work ? and long before alleged Iraqi ties with terrorists became a central rationale for war ? has been raised elsewhere, including in a book based on recollections of former Treasury Secretary Paul O?Neill. However, Herskowitz was in a unique position to hear Bush?s unguarded and unfiltered views on Iraq, war and other matters ? well before he became president.
It was obvious to many of us at the time that all the deliberations and presentations to the UN were a sham and that the Bush administration was determined to invade. The question has always been why. The explanation provided from Herkowitz's comments is about as damning as any I can think of.
According to Herskowitz, who has authored more than 30 books, many of them jointly written autobiographies of famous Americans in politics, sports and media (including that of Reagan adviser Michael Deaver), Bush and his advisers were sold on the idea that it was difficult for a president to accomplish an electoral agenda without the record-high approval numbers that accompany successful if modest wars.
...
According to Herskowitz, George W. Bush?s beliefs on Iraq were based in part on a notion dating back to the Reagan White House ? ascribed in part to now-vice president Dick Cheney, Chairman of the House Republican Policy Committee under Reagan. ?Start a small war. Pick a country where there is justification you can jump on, go ahead and invade.?Bush?s circle of pre-election advisers had a fixation on the political capital that British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher collected from the Falklands War. Said Herskowitz: ?They were just absolutely blown away, just enthralled by the scenes of the troops coming back, of the boats, people throwing flowers at [Thatcher] and her getting these standing ovations in Parliament and making these magnificent speeches.?
...
Herskowitz?s revelations are not the sole indicator of Bush?s pre-election thinking on Iraq. In December 1999, some six months after his talks with Herskowitz, Bush surprised veteran political chroniclers, including the Boston Globe?s David Nyhan, with his blunt pronouncements about Saddam at a six-way New Hampshire primary event that got little notice: ?It was a gaffe-free evening for the rookie front-runner, till he was asked about Saddam?s weapons stash,? wrote Nyhan. ?I?d take ?em out,? [Bush] grinned cavalierly, ?take out the weapons of mass destruction?I?m surprised he?s still there,? said Bush of the despot who remains in power after losing the Gulf War to Bush Jr.?s father?It remains to be seen if that offhand declaration of war was just Texas talk, a sort of locker room braggadocio, or whether it was Bush?s first big clinker. ?
There's also evidence provided in the piece about Herskowitz's credibility - it seems he has some. And frankly, there's nothing here that really surprises me.
This explanation would mean that Iraq can't in any way qualify as even a pre-emptive invasion. It would make it a war of choice for selfish political reasons. 100,000 Iraqi dead and who knows how many more wounded, 1,100 dead American troops and thousands more wounded, and all for the sake of increasing Bush's "political capital" so he could have a successful presidency.
There's your moral clarity, folks. There's your leadership. Even if you don't like John Kerry I'd suggest that he's the only way right now to get Bush out of the White House. And Job One right now is to end George Bush's influence on world events as quickly as possible.
Household Survey Sees 100,000 Iraqi Deaths
A survey of deaths in Iraqi households estimates that as many as 100,000 more people may have died throughout the country in the 18 months since the U.S.-led invasion than would be expected based on the death rate before the war.
...
The scientists who wrote the report concede that the data they based their projections on were of "limited precision," because the quality of the information depends on the accuracy of the household interviews used for the study. The interviewers were Iraqi, most of them doctors.Designed and conducted by researchers at Johns Hopkins University, Columbia University and the Al-Mustansiriya University in Baghdad, the study is being published Thursday on the Web site of The Lancet medical journal.
...
Richard Peto, an expert on study methods who was not involved with the research, said the approach the scientists took is a reasonable one to investigate the Iraq death toll.
...
The most common causes of death before the invasion of Iraq were heart attacks, strokes and other chronic diseases. However, after the invasion, violence was recorded as the primary cause of death and was mainly attributed to coalition forces with about 95 percent of those deaths caused by bombs or fire from helicopter gunships.Violent deaths defined as those brought about by the intentional act of others were reported in 15 of the 33 clusters. The chances of a violent death were 58 times higher after the invasion than before it, the researchers said.
So now am I allowed to curse George Bush in as many languages as I know without being accused of irrational Bush hatred?
Valley broadcaster donates airtime to aid Republicans
Attempting to boost Republican Party prospects, the owner of a chain of Central Valley television and radio stations has donated $325,000 in air time for GOP candidates in many of the state's hottest legislative elections.The contribution by Harry J. Pappas comes in the final days of campaigning, and those involved in the campaigns could not recall another instance in which a California media mogul donated time on public airwaves for advertisements to benefit one party over another.
Critics say the contribution is a clear attempt to sway close elections, is likely to raise new questions of media bias, and violates federal law requiring broadcasting companies to provide equal time to political candidates.
"They're the public's airwaves," said attorney Karen Getman, who represents the Assembly Democratic Caucus and formerly served as chairwoman of the state's Fair Political Practices Commission. "You're not free to give them to one side in a partisan debate."
Democrats released a letter Monday demanding equal time on Pappas' stations. But Mike Angelos, spokesman for Harry Pappas and his media chain, Pappas Telecasting Companies, said the legality of the $325,000 in contributions was researched thoroughly.
Rather than give away free air time, which is illegal under federal law, Pappas Telecasting Companies essentially is footing the bill itself for broadcasting minutes it is setting aside for GOP candidates, Angelos said.
"We're not denying [Democrats] any opportunity," he said. "They have the opportunity to purchase an equivalent amount of air time."
Via Atrios.
I didn't know much about John Kerry when he first won the Democratic nomination for president. I just thought he'd have to be awfully bad in order to be worse than four more years of Bush.
Back in August I blogged a Washington Monthly story that described how Kerry stared down resistance by powerful opponents, including senior members of his own party, when he insisted on investigating the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI). In the end he was vindicated when BCCI was revealed to be "a vast criminal enterprise" and, not incidentally, a funder of terrorism.
Via Susan at Surburban Guerrilla, there's another interesting story on Kerry's time in the Senate at Salon. (Unfortunately it's premium content - you'll have to sit through an ad to get a Day Pass.)
In late 1985, a couple of years before the BCCI investigation began, Kerry got wind of allegations that the Contras, who were being supported by the Reagan/Bush administration in their resistance against the Sandinista government in Nicaragua, were heavily involved in cocaine smuggling and that American agencies might be complicit in it. Kerry tried to enlist both congress and the press in an investigation but received little support and eventually a lot of resistance and even condemnation.
The Reagan administration did everything it could to thwart Kerry's investigation, including attempting to discredit witnesses, stonewalling the Senate when it requested evidence and assigning the CIA to monitor Kerry's probe. But it couldn't stop Kerry and his investigators from discovering the explosive truth: that the Contra war was permeated with drug traffickers who gave the Contras money, weapons and equipment in exchange for help in smuggling cocaine into the United States. Even more damningly, Kerry found that U.S. government agencies knew about the Contra-drug connection, but turned a blind eye to the evidence in order to avoid undermining a top Reagan-Bush foreign policy initiative.The Reagan administration's tolerance and protection of this dark underbelly of the Contra war represented one of the most sordid scandals in the history of U.S. foreign policy. Yet when Kerry's bombshell findings were released in 1989, they were greeted by the mainstream press with disdain and disinterest. The New York Times, which had long denigrated the Contra-drug allegations, buried the story of Kerry's report on its inside pages, as did the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times. For his tireless efforts, Kerry earned a reputation as a reckless investigator. Newsweek's Conventional Wisdom Watch dubbed Kerry a "randy conspiracy buff."
Its stunning conclusion: "On the basis of the evidence, it is clear that individuals who provided support for the Contras were involved in drug trafficking, the supply network of the Contras was used by drug trafficking organizations, and elements of the Contras themselves knowingly received financial and material assistance from drug traffickers. In each case, one or another agency of the U.S. government had information regarding the involvement either while it was occurring, or immediately thereafter."The report discovered that drug traffickers gave the Contras "cash, weapons, planes, pilots, air supply services and other materials." Moreover, the U.S. State Department had paid some drug traffickers as part of a program to fly non-lethal assistance to the Contras. Some payments occurred "after the traffickers had been indicted by federal law enforcement agencies on drug charges, in others while traffickers were under active investigation by these same agencies."
Although Kerry's findings represented the first time a congressional report explicitly accused federal agencies of willful collaboration with drug traffickers, the major news organizations chose to bury the startling findings. Instead of front-page treatment, the New York Times, the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times all wrote brief accounts and stuck them deep inside their papers. The New York Times article, only 850 words long, landed on Page 8. The Post placed its story on A20. The Los Angeles Times found space on Page 11.
The government's decade-long Contra cocaine cover-up began to crumble when CIA inspector general Frederick Hitz published the first of two volumes of his Contra cocaine investigation on Jan. 29, 1998, followed by a Justice Department report and Hitz's second volume in October 1998.The CIA inspector general and Justice Department reports confirmed that the Reagan administration knew from almost the outset of the Contra war that cocaine traffickers permeated the CIA-backed army but the administration did next to nothing to expose or stop these criminals. The reports revealed example after example of leads not followed, witnesses disparaged and official law-enforcement investigations sabotaged. The evidence indicated that Contra-connected smugglers included the Medellin cartel, the Panamanian government of Manuel Noriega, the Honduran military, the Honduran-Mexican smuggling ring of Ramon Matta Ballesteros, and Miami-based anti-Castro Cubans.
The Salon article is fairly long and there's a lot more detail than I've provided here. The point is that in this, as in the BCCI investigation and even his earlier opposition to the Vietnam war, Kerry seems to have a pattern of persevering even when a course of action doesn't necessarily look like the politically smart thing to do. And if there's one thing the U.S., not to mention the rest of us, could use it's a leader who doesn't look at every decision in terms of its political ramifications alone.
I've seen a number of supporters of Bush insist that as poor as he may be on domestic policy, he has the vision required to lead America in the War on Terror™. I don't see it. I see someone who doesn't understand the real problems he faces because he chooses not to. And I see someone who's proven repeatedly that not only does he pursue the wrong policies, he does it badly. On a day like today, when the big news story involves 380 tons of highly powerful explosives that went missing in Iraq a year and a half ago, even though the White House knew exactly where it was going in, Bush looks like someone who couldn't find his butt with both hands.
In Kerry I see someone who may a serial exaggerator in his political rhetoric but on his worst day doesn't come close to being the dissembler that Bush is. And in Kerry, increasingly, I see someone who has a nose for the truth and the courage to go where it leads him when he thinks it's important.
That doesn't mean I'm going to agree with everything he does. There's a pretty big gap between American foreign policy as it is, and as I think it should be. The gap was there before Bush took office and I would expect it to remain, at least in part, through a Kerry presidency. But the more I find out about Kerry's time in the Senate, the better I like it.
Update:
If you want to read the original article without sitting through the ad at Salon, it's been "liberated" at truthout.
Back in May, shortly after Dazzling Dalton McGuinty's government brought down their first Ontario budget, I dressed them down for ignoring the KISS principle. As I wrote at the time, I fully expected to see them come looking for more revenue but I was more than a little annoyed when they announced the return of the health care premium.
I am going to chime in alongside Andrew Spicer and ask why McGuinty didn't just raise income taxes rather than creating a separate premium for health care. It's not like the money doesn't come from the same source: the taxpayer. He's just made things more complicated not only for government, but for employers who have to deduct the thing from employees' pay cheques. Had he just tweaked the income tax rate up, he could have reduced it again if the opportunity presented itself.
Well, it's less than six months later and it's just about time for the Law of Unintended Consequences to raise it's ugly but predictable head.
The spectre of Ontario's controversial health-care premium returned to haunt the Liberal government today amid a growing controversy over whether some unionized workers should be expected to pay for it.Premier Dalton McGuinty, whose government shattered a key election promise by introducing the premium in May, had to defend it again after an arbitrator ruled that a Guelph nursing home should pay the premium for its employees because of an old clause in their collective agreement.
"Our intention is that taxpayers have to pay," McGuinty said.
The premium, which takes between $60 and $900 a year from taxpayers earning at least $20,000 annually, is running afoul of contracts with language dating back to the days of an earlier generation of health premiums.Those contracts required employers to cover the cost of health insurance premiums, abolished in 1990. In the case of the Guelph nursing home, an arbitrator has decided the new premium is covered by the old clause.
"My view is the Ontario health premium is the responsibility of individual taxpayers, that the legislation does not contemplate premiums as that notion is referred to in existing collective agreements, but, you know, we'll see."
And to add insult to injury (for me anyway), it was Conservative house leader Bob Runciman who really nailed it.
Conservative house leader Bob Runciman warned that the province is in a precarious position with respect to public-sector workers, who are effectively under the employ of the government.Should school board employees or hospital workers be exempted from paying the premium, the taxpayer would end up holding the bag - in addition to already paying their own premium, Runciman said.
"There would be a lot of Ontarians who would be damned upset about the fact that they're paying out of one pocket for this health-care premium, and then out of the other pocket they're paying for public-sector workers' health-care premiums as well," he said.
To review: McGuinty implemented a premium instead of a tax increase to avoid being criticized for breaking a promise, but it was such a transparent maneuver that he's taking the heat anyway. And because he tried to be cute it looks as though the revenue actually raised through this policy will be substantially less than planned because the government, as employer, may have to pay the premiums on behalf of its employees. So in addition to looking like he broke his promise and cynically tried to skate around it, now he looks like an incompetent fool as well and may just further enrage all those who have to pay the premium out of their own pockets. It's almost a textbook case of blowback.
Moron.
Though I have to admit it's been a long day and I needed the rant.
You're probably already aware that Jon Stewart, host of a comedy show called The Daily Show, made a recent appearance on CNN's Crossfire in which he took his hosts to task for being partisan hacks and "hurting America". Just in case you're not aware, you can see the segment in Quicktime format here.
There's an op-ed in the Toronto Star today that takes Stewart to task in turn. It seems Stewart's expectations of Crossfire are too high.
For those unfamiliar with its format, Crossfire is a political "chat" show in which two, and later, four, hostile and starkly partisan advocates take turns yelling at one another. The very day Stewart appeared on the program, co-host Paul Begala described it this way: "Our show is about ... left vs. right, black vs. white, paper vs. plastic, Red Sox against Yankees." It isn't subtle.
...
... Crossfire was never intended to serve as a formal debating society. To criticize it for "doing theatre" is akin to attacking The Daily Show for its utter lack of seriousness.Stewart must be the only person in North America who turns to Crossfire hoping for an outbreak of civility.
Could this be a case of the print media reserving to itself the role to be the real gatekeepers of serious reporting? Apparently not.
Its pointless to look here ? or anywhere else in the media ? for grand truths, or for society to be saved through earnest and elevated debate.
Leslie Papp is a member of the Star's editorial board.
Yesterday the Bush/Cheney campaign unveiled a new campaign ad called "Wolves".
It may become the most talked about spot of the 2004 race -- especially if Bush wins. Moody and ominous, the 30-second ad mines the shadowy light-and-dark world of a mysterious forest, with an occasional nano-second flash of danger, before showing the large pack (sleeper cell?) of wolves ready to attack at the first sign of weakness.
But what I find most interesting is the speed with which this new website popped up. It's called Wolf Packs for Truth.org and says, among other things:
We were tricked by George W. Bush
They told us we were shooting a Greenpeace commercial!
PM sought to scrap health act: Copps
Prime Minister Paul Martin wanted to scrap the Canada Health Act when he was a deficit-fighting finance minister, says Sheila Copps in a politically explosive new memoir.The former deputy prime minister and Chr?tien loyalist, who was soundly defeated by Martin for the Liberal leadership, says she insisted on last-minute changes to the 1995 federal budget that prevented Martin's initiative.
The document included Martin's plan "to end the out-dated Canada Health Act and replace it with something more flexible after discussions with the provinces," says Copps in her not-yet released book, Worth Fighting For.
...
Scrapping the health act was meant as a federal "carrot" dangled by Martin to ease the pain of drastic cuts to health and social service transfers, Copps writes in a three-page excerpt.
...
Copps said she was flabbergasted that the former finance minister was set to breach the federal sanctity of medicare."When I saw the reference to the Canada Health Act and the proposal to abolish it, I knew this was political dynamite.
"For a Liberal government to be doing this was a betrayal of our basic principles. I went to Martin with my concerns but he shrugged them off, saying it was too late, because the budget had already gone to print."
In fact, the budget presses had not yet rolled.
Backed by Chr?tien, Martin's leadership nemesis, Copps says she forced the former finance minister to do a last-minute rewrite of the budget which was sent to her home fax machine at midnight on the day before its release.
"The offending words had been removed, but it was clear the fight for the Canada Health Act had only just begun."
But now I have to try and decide whether I can believe Paul Martin or must actually credit the idea that Sheila Copps saved Canadian health care. Couldn't I have an easier project to work on? Like world peace?
If Copps is right, she won't be the only one to know about this. It'll be interesting to see if anyone steps forward to confirm her version of events. Meanwhile:
Her book, to be released Monday, includes many other surprises, said publisher Douglas Gibson of Douglas Gibson Books, McClelland & Stewart.
I've grown accustomed to American ambassador Paul Cellucci's warnings that we Canadians should stop pretending to be an open society and cower under our beds while our betters instruct our government on how best to combat terrorism. But now it seems we have a new instructor. Alan Baker has been Israel's ambassador to Canada for all of five weeks and already appears destined to be a more polite version of Cellucci.
Alan Baker said Canadians must realize additional restrictions on rights and freedoms are necessary to counter the relative ease with which terror groups can now infiltrate Canadian society and launch attacks here, against the United States or on Israeli and other foreign interests in Canada.
Now consider the timing:
His comments to the Citizen's editorial board come as a parliamentary committee prepares to review a sweeping series of anti-terrorism laws enacted in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks and which many legal and civil liberties experts believe already violate fundamental rules of law and democratic rights.
The question in the title of the post is a serious one. This article is the lead story on the front page of the Citizen's website right now. Would I be correct in assuming that given Baker's self-acknowledged ignorance on the subject, it's unlikely that he called up the paper's editorial board to insist that his opinion should be front page news?
The judicial investigation of the sponsorship scandal won't be turned into a "gravy train" for lawyers representing the Liberals, Conservatives and Bloc Qu?b?cois, Justice John Gomery warned yesterday.The Quebec judge, who was already planning to pay a total of about $1.5 million to counsel for the political parties to allow them to take part in the public hearings, reacted testily to requests for even more money.
Complaining about the mountain of documents that must be digested to understand what happened in the seven-year sponsorship affair, lawyers for the three parties told Gomery yesterday they couldn't properly represent their clients without an increase in fees.
The new requests from the Liberals, Conservatives and Bloc would triple the bill for their lawyers to more than $4.5 million, Gomery estimated.
"It would be easy for me to say sure, everybody gets on the gravy train, everybody is going to be able to have as much money as they would like to have to be represented here," he said.
"But I think there is a certain responsibility to keep expenses down to a reasonable level."
Gomery, whose 18-month inquiry is budgeted at more than $20 million, is sensitive to the irony of devoting large amounts of taxpayers' money to find out what happened to the millions in federal cash. "If a lawyer is engaged by a rich client, I think the lawyer's bill is inevitably higher than if the lawyer is engaged by a poor client ... "I don't want counsel in this case to think that they are acting for a rich client. This commission is not a rich commission," he added, saying he must haggle with federal officials "for each and every penny that is spent."
After startling the lawyers present by suggesting that the fee demands might force him to change his mind and bar the parties' counsel from taking part in the commission hearings, Gomery said he would review their requests and issue a decision later.
Cross-posted to the E-Group.
The latest issue of Maclean's includes an article that reminds us of an important upcoming anniversary. Bill C36, the Anti-Terrorism Act, received Royal Assent on Dec. 18, 2001. As a result of criticism of the initial draft of the legislation, the bill as finally passed included the stipulation that it would be reviewed by Parliament in three years, which would mean that review will take place in the current session. (That assumes, of course, that the government doesn't fall before we get to that point.)
The Maclean's article reports that the Canadian Bar Association, which was critical of the original legislation, is already working on the position it will take regarding the review and is hopeful that this far removed from 9/11 its criticisms will be taken more seriously.
...during the spring election, the influential lawyers' umbrella group said the anti-terrorism measures Ottawa took after Sept. 11 "dramatically expand state powers at the expense of due process and individual rights and freedoms." The association also warned about "the resulting invasions of privacy and fundamental rights that have been creeping into Canadian law over the past few years."
Unfortunately our government doesn't seem to have its own accountability firmly in hand.
The two most controversial measures in the act are so-called preventive arrests and investigative hearings. The arrest power allows police to detain a suspect without a warrant if they deem it necessary to stop a terrorist action. The power to compel individuals to testify at secret hearings is designed to make sure authorities can collect vital information on terrorist activities. While government is required to report annually on how these two extraordinary tools are used, it has done so only once since the law was passed, reporting that neither power was exercised in 2002. No report for 2003 has yet been released, prompting criticism from civil liberties advocates. But federal officials said the report for 2003 is being "fine-tuned" and should be made public soon.
The timing would be even better if the Arar inquiry was completed but the latest report there is that public testimony won't even resume until the new year, while this review should take place in mid-December. Still I'm hoping that the CBA is right and that this will be the opportunity for the kind of thoughtful debate on the compromises to civil liberties contained in this legislation that was difficult to have in the wake of 9/11.
And on the subject of the Arar case:
One part of anti-terrorism law that Ottawa is already committed to reviewing is the widely criticized section of the Security of Information Act that was used early this year to search a journalist's home and office. The RCMP was hunting for clues to the source of leaked information to an Ottawa Citizen reporter who had written about the case of Maher Arar, whose deportation to Syria by U.S. authorities in now the subject of an inquiry.
I would like it noted for the record that I thought of the title for this post before I got to this point in this Washington Post article:
"George Bush continues to make history for all the wrong reasons," said Kerry campaign spokesman Phil Singer.
The federal government reached its $7.4 trillion debt ceiling yesterday, forcing Treasury Secretary John W. Snow to delay contributing to one of the federal employees' pension systems to avoid running out of cash and possibly defaulting on government debt.The situation will probably be temporary, as it has in the past. Congressional leaders said that when they return for a lame-duck session after the election, they will raise the debt ceiling to allow the government to borrow the money it needs to pay its bills. At that point, any overdue contributions to the pension fund would be paid, with interest.
The debt ceiling was first imposed in 1917 to act as a brake on the total amount of accumulated debt the government owes....Since then, the Treasury has on five occasions delayed pension fund payments as it approached its limit on borrowing. Three of those incidents came under President Bush -- in 2002, 2003 and yesterday -- as Republicans in Congress have become leery of voting to raise the debt limit.
*insert rolling eyes smilie here*
If you happen by the front page of the Drudge Report in the next while you may see a headline that reads:
MOVE TO EXCOMMUNICATE KERRY AND OTHERS ADVANCES...
A canon lawyer seeking to have Senator John Kerry excommunicated by the Roman Catholic Church because of his support for abortion rights said on Monday that he had ammunition in the form of a letter issued at the request of a senior Vatican official.The lawyer, Marc Balestrieri of Los Angeles, who heads a conservative Catholic nonprofit organization called De Fide, also said that, based on the letter, he would now seek to have four other Catholic politicians excommunicated: Senators Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts, Tom Harkin of Iowa, Susan Collins of Maine, and Mario M. Cuomo, the former governor of New York.
"Senator Kerry, and all pro-choice Catholic politicians, who publicly call themselves Catholic yet who blatantly violate canon law by continuing to profess heresy and receive Holy Communion, must publicly reject their abortion advocacy for the sake of their own souls, and the others they have scandalized," Mr. Balestrieri said in a statement. "They have been excommunicated."
Father Cole, author of the response received by De Fide, was contacted on Monday evening and in a courteous and extremely affable tone explained that he does not speak for the Vatican. The response that he had provided to Mr. Balestrieri was simply his personal opinion.
Father Cole is lamenting the fact that his missive was brought up Friday on the Catholic cable channel EWTN and is being discussed widely on the Internet since Mr. Balestrieri posted it on his Web site, www.defide.org."It's a letter about an abstract question," the priest said. "It's not from the Vatican at all. It has no authority at all. None. Zip. Zero. It's not the teaching of the church; it's me implying what I think are the teachings."
It's just another normal day on the world wide web.
Putin urges voters to back Bush
Russian President Vladimir Putin says terrorist attacks in Iraq are aimed at preventing the re-election of U.S. President George W. Bush and that a Bush defeat "could lead to the spread of terrorism to other parts of the world."Putin, speaking Central Asian Cooperation Organization summit in Tajikistan Monday, made his most overt comments of support so far for the re-election of Bush for a second term.
"Any unbiased observer understands that attacks of international terrorist organizations in Iraq, especially nowadays, are targeted not only and not so much against the international coalition as against President Bush," Putin said.
Putin has done his best to strip the context away from terrorist operations by Chechen rebels and pretend that it's as simple as "they hate our freedoms". He's then used it as an excuse to consolidate his own power. It's just another example of the way the War on Terror™ is more about politics than about solving real problems.
Link via Body and Soul.
It was a year ago today that I started this blog. Actually not this blog since I started out at Blogger and moved over here in the spring. But it was a year ago today that I became a blogger. I started the thing as an experiment and here I am, a year later, still experimenting.
Thanks to all of you who drop by. And thanks to Matthew at Living in a Society for reminding me to look it up. I knew he and I started around the same time -- his anniversary was yesterday.
Now let's see if I can experiment my way through another year.
'NAFTA-plus' talks aim for security pact
Senior business and political leaders from Canada, the United States and Mexico are joining forces to establish a blueprint for a powerhouse North American trading bloc to take on the world, shielded by a Fortress America-style defence perimeter.The trinational task force, which has the full backing of the three governments, has been charged with creating a road map toward a continent-wide customs-free zone with a common approach to trade, energy, immigration, law enforcement and security that would virtually eliminate existing national borders.
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The task force will report to the prestigious U.S. Council on Foreign Relations, and received the blessing of Anne McLellan, Canada's Public Safety Minister, and Tom Ridge, the U.S. Homeland Security Secretary, during a meeting in Ottawa this week.Ms. McLellan will be in Toronto on Monday for the first round of the task force hearings as the first step in creating a NAFTA-plus regional trading bloc to compete with the European Union, China, Japan and India.
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A task force source said Paul Martin has encouraged the initiative, though the Prime Minister would not be able to act on its recommendations unless the Liberals win a majority government.
The Canadian chair of the task force is John Manley, someone with political aspirations of his own who is already on record* as being in favour of so-called deep integration. The Canadian vice-chair, as reported by the U.S. Council on Foreign Relations who are organizing this little shindig, is none other than Thomas D'Aquino, head of the Canadian Council of Chief Executives. Deep integration is his wet dream.
Pardon my cynicism but this looks like a setup. The two senior Canadians on the task force are already on record as being cheerleaders for this enterprise. One of them has the ear of the ruling Liberal party and the other is effectively the leader of the Canadian corporate community. I expect both of them to be full of boyish enthusiasm about what we in Canada would have to gain from their eventual proposal. What I don't expect from either of them is an honest assessment of what we might have to lose. I expect we'll be left to figure that out for ourselves.
And we may well have to figure it out in a hurry. Go back and read the last paragraph I quoted. The task force is due to report this summer. I wonder if this will be the issue of the next election campaign and if we'll be expected to sign away another chunk of our sovereignty without knowing what we're really getting into. Again.
A tip of the hat to sgm at the babble discussion board for the links.
* Once again let me express my profound gratitude to the Globe and Mail. Once upon a time the article I linked to in the post I reference above was in plain view. Since the Globe went to a subscription model, it'll now cost you $4.95 to read something that's six months old and was once available for free. Awesome, isn't it?
There's an interesting piece in the Globe and Mail (reproduced at CTV for those who aren't registered at the Globe) that updates the story about the drive to unionize a Wal-mart store in Jonquiere, Quebec. There's background here on how the effort to unionize began as well as some history and analysis of other attempts to organize Wal-Mart employees elsewhere in Canada as well as in the U.S.
One story that surfaces from time to time is that there is already one group of meatpackers in a store in Texas that are unionized. Here's the full story on that.
The closest a U.S. union has ever come to winning a battle with Wal-Mart was in 2000, at a store in Jacksonville, Texas. In that store, 11 workers ? all members of the store's meatpacking department ? voted to join and be represented by the UFCW. The union represents employees at many of the nation's supermarkets and, while it is not the only union that has targeted Wal-Mart, it has long been the retailers' principal adversary in organized labour.After the Texas vote, Wal-Mart took a stance that has become typical ? and is now being echoed in Canada ? arguing before labour officials that any union should represent all employees at the store. That argument was rejected. But Wal-Mart announced a change that it said had long been planned and had nothing to do with the Texas store. It eliminated the job of meat-cutter company-wide, and announced it would only sell pre-cut, pre-wrapped meat.
In theory, the case of the Texas meat-cutters, who were offered other jobs by the company, remains alive before the National Labour Relations Board. But none of the 11 employees who voted to unionize still work at the store and the union campaign there has stalled.
Each side now says it is waiting to hear from the other. But Quebec law will not let them put it off forever. If Wal-Mart resists negotiating, the union can ask for a mediator, who could then issue an interim contract.
Paul Martin recently managed to endear himself to some of us, for a change, by putting a halt on a planned 10% pay hike for MPs, who had a 20% increase only three years ago. MPs were apparently not impressed at Martin's unilateral decision that $141,300 per annum was enough for a back bencher, and so they've been busy coming up with a Plan B.
Members of Parliament from all parties are quietly discussing a $55,000 increase in their office, travel and entertainment budget, two weeks after Prime Minister Paul Martin quashed their 10% pay hike.The plan would boost MPs' annual office budgets to $293,000, although Conservative House leader John Reynolds has raised concerns it is too generous and certain to engender voter backlash, insiders say.
Sources say Mr. Reynolds has proposed instead an immediate increase in MPs' office budget of 10%, or $23,800, and then another 10% in January.
By the way, did you get that? They already have a $238,000 budget but suddenly there's a compelling need to increase it by more than 23%. Immediately after their raise was quashed.
The public would not know about any increase in MPs' office budgets until next year, when the spending estimates for 2004-05 are presented in the Commons, or until the minutes from the Board of Internal of Economy are tabled.We know now. Can you say tone deaf? I sure can. Can we have another election and send all 308 of these porkers home?
My apologies to real pigs everywhere who, unlike these bozos in Ottawa, are actually supposed to be pretty intelligent animals.
Update:
Sean incognito documents the whole sorry story in more detail than I had the patience to do. You can read him at his own blog or at the E-Group.
Back in January I poked fun at our Liberal government's revenue forecasts. I also quoted this bit from a Globe and Mail article* with comments attributed to Treasury Board president Reg Alcock:
Government "is a big business and there's lots of money all over the place," he said in a recent interview. "There is literally some amounts of money that is just there, just sitting there, that we've discovered."
Noting the numbers are more than four times bigger than first predicted, the federal government has confirmed it recorded a surplus of $9.1 billion in the last fiscal year.Issuing the announcement in Ottawa on Wednesday morning, Finance Minister Ralph Goodale said the entire surplus would be used to pay down Canada's federal debt, which stood at $501.5 billion on March 31.
Supposedly steps have been taken to prevent these kinds of surprises in future.
This is not the first time the Liberals have faced allegations of deliberately low-balling the surplus.In response, Goodale announced last month the appointment of Bank of Montreal economist Tim O'Neill to investigate Ottawa's economic and fiscal forecasting. His investigation will be completed early next year.
"We have commissioned a thorough independent, professional analysis of our projection methodology," Goodale reminded reporters.
"We want to review our way of doing the forecast to make sure we are not only doing it by the best Canadian standards, but by the best international standards."
Martin has an explanation for the surplus but I'm sparing you his inane comparison to his golf game. And I'm not buying the innocent explanations because this has been going on for seven years. Consistently. No one is that lucky.
* I'm not providing a link. The Globe and Mail, in their infinite avarice wisdom, now wants $4.95 to purchase a single article. Who are they kidding?
I had a wee computer problem over the weekend. I seem to have recovered but I'm spending some time checking things over, house-cleaning the hard drives, checking and updating backups, etc. Posting will resume eventually but first things first.
You can talk amongst yourselves if you like.
For those of you who have been following attempts by Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives to legalize extraordinary rendition, the news isn't good. A few days ago there was a hopeful sign when the White House appeared to back away from support for that particular provision of the legislation in question. But the House has passed it anyway with only a minor ammendment.
House leaders did agree to amend wording that would have allowed the government to deport foreign terror suspects to countries where they could face torture. The amendment, proposed by Representative John Hostettler, Republican of Indiana, would allow the Department of Homeland Security to detain the suspects but would bar deportation until after the State Department had sought assurances that they would not be harmed.
This story comes by way of Katherine R at Obsidian Wings who's been leading the charge against this measure in the blogosphere. As she writes:
One problem: the State Department already seeks those assurances. In practice, they provide no protection at all against torture.
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A full Human Rights Watch report on the worthlessness of diplomatic assurances not to torture is available here.
The New York Times story notes that there is a Senate version of the bill which more closely resembles the recommendations of the 9/11 commission report, which is what this is supposed to be all about, and that lacks this provision for outsourcing torture. Despite the Bush administration's recent statements, it's endorsing the House version.
Democrats think the differences in the two bills amount to political gamesmanship.
"It's not hard to see what's going on here," said Representative Carolyn B. Maloney, Democrat of New York. "Some say that the goal of the Republican leadership is to pass a bill that cannot be reconciled with the Senate bill before the election. The Republican leadership knows that after the elections, when the political pressure is off, the prospects for reform will vanish."
Dick Cheney's at it again. The main subject of this article is Cheney's attempt to turn attention from the lack of special weapons in Iraq to Saddam's efforts to corrupt the UN oil-for-food program. I addressed that in my last post.
But Cheney couldn't resist the opportunity to tell another whopper.
On another topic, Cheney said that this weekend's elections in Afghanistan could be rocky."It will be difficult. There will be attacks on polling places. Remnants of the old Taliban regime don't want those elections to succeed," Cheney said. But he predicted that democracy would prevail in what he said was "the first election in Afghanistan in 5,000 years."
Thanks to Bump for the Afghanistan history link.
The final report by the Iraq Survey Group, the body charged by the White House with finding out the truth about Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction, has now been released. Perhaps all you need to know is that Bush and Cheney are now trying to find yet another way to justify the invasion of Iraq.
President Bush and his vice president conceded Thursday in the clearest terms yet that Saddam Hussein had no weapons of mass destruction, even as they tried to shift the Iraq war debate to a new issue - whether the invasion was justified because Saddam was abusing a U.N. oil-for-food program.
The report repeats previously stated accusations of corruption in the UN oil-for-food program and adds a new twist: Saddam was using the program to bribe officials to help weaken the sanctions and to prevent an invasion.
Efforts appeared to be under way yesterday to draw public attention away from the absence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq by suggesting that senior figures in France and Russia - which was also anti-war - may have been paid to support Saddam's regime. The ultra-nationalist Russian politician Vladimir Zhirinovsky, whose name is on the list, repeated his denial that he benefited from Saddam's bribes yesterday.The report also partially repeats a list naming figures from all over the world - including a French oilman said to be close to the French President, Jacques Chirac - who received preferential treatment in the allocation of oil export licences.
However, unlike the first list published by the Iraqi newspaper al-Mada in January, which detailed the beneficiaries of a kickback scheme devised by Saddam, this one carries the official approval of the US authorities.
All the American names, and all but one of the UN names, have vanished. The names of US companies and individuals had been removed "because of US privacy laws".
a convicted criminal, forger of documents, producer of phony intelligence and, in all likelihood, someone who passed on American intelligence to Iran
Before anyone assumes that a case has been made that Russia and France were bribed into blocking UN approval for the invasion, I'd consider the source. This would be the same Ahmad Chalabi who insisted that Saddam had special weapons and ties to Al-Qaeda. And Charles Duelfer, current head of the ISG, states clearly that the accusations haven't been investigated. They just took what was given to them, removed the American names, and published it. Within weeks of the US election. Timing is everything.
Obligatory disclaimer: if it can be proven that someone broke the law, fine. Charge him and put him in jail. So far it isn't happening and this sounds suspiciously like more spin from someone who announced two months ago that this report would consist largely of speculative fiction.
Meanwhile, there's still nothing here to suggest that continued inspections and some form of sanctions wouldn't have contained Saddam and prevented the development of any serious threat.
Iraq had destroyed its illicit weapons stockpiles within months after the Persian Gulf war of 1991, and its ability to produce such weapons had significantly eroded by the time of the American invasion in 2003, the top American inspector for Iraq said in a report made public Wednesday.The report by the inspector, Charles A. Duelfer, intended to offer a near-final judgment about Iraq and its weapons, said Iraq, while under pressure from the United Nations, had "essentially destroyed'' its illicit weapons ability by the end of 1991, with its last secret factory, a biological weapons plant, eliminated in 1996.
Mr. Duelfer said that even during those years, Saddam Hussein had aimed at "preserving the capability to reconstitute his weapons of mass destruction when sanctions were lifted.'' But he said he had found no evidence of any concerted effort by Iraq to restart the programs.
Last week I wrote about a piece of legislation introduced in the American House of Representatives that would make extraordinary rendition, the deportation of suspected terrorists to countries that practice torture, legal under American law. At the time it was suggested that the Justice Department was strongly in favour and it was inferred that the White House was too. But if that was so, there's been a change of heart.
President Bush today distanced himself from his administration?s quiet effort to push through a law that would make it easier to send captured terror suspects to countries where torture is used. The proposed law, recently tacked onto a much larger bill despite the fallout from last spring?s interrogation scandal, is seen as an attempt to counter a recent Supreme Court decision that would free some terror detainees being held without trial.In a letter published in The Washington Post, White House legal counsel Alberto Gonzales said the president ?did not propose and does not support? a provision to the House bill that removes legal protections from suspects preventing their ?rendering? to foreign governments known to torture prisoners. Gonzales said Bush ?has made clear that the United States stands against and will not tolerate torture.?
But John Feehery, spokesman for House Speaker Dennis Hastert, who introduced the bill last Friday, said the provision had actually been requested by the Department of Homeland Security. ?For whatever reason,? Feehery said, ?the White House has decided they don?t want to take this on because they?re afraid of the political implications.?
He said the provision, mainly laid out in Section 3032 and 3033, was designed as a way of addressing the problem created by last summer?s Supreme Court decision. The justices ruled that the administration couldn?t detain people indefinitely without trial or charges.
We may not have seen the last of this.
Feehery said Hastert still supported the provision in spite of Gonzales?s letter.
Link via The Poor Man from whom I also stole my title.
Further reading: It was blogger Katherine R who first broke this story in a diary posting at Daily Kos. Writing at Obsidian Wings, she provides a detailed story of an extraordinary rendition in December, 2001 when two men were transported by U.S. "officials" wearing balaclavas from Sweden to Cairo where they were imprisoned and tortured.
The head and subhead on this story in yesterday's National Post read as follows:
Majority of Canadians back missile shield
Solid majority want Canada in post-9/11 military structure
A narrow majority of 49% -- compared to 44% in favour -- would reject Canada's participation in missile defence if it wasn't for their concern that Canada could be cut out of U.S. decisions on continental security.
Canadians will only embrace missile defence if it is linked to the overall security of North America. Asked if they would support Canada's involvement in missile defence if it meant being part of Northcom, 48% said yes while 44% were opposed.
Deeper in the article you'll find this:
But the greatest concern to Canadian policy-makers is the likelihood Canada's role in Northcom and even the North American Aerospace Defence Command (NORAD) could be compromised.
You can read the whole National Post story if you like but you won't find the actual questions that were posed in the poll. It's impossible to tell if they were accidentally or purposely designed to blur the distinction between NORAD and Northcom, or if the current nature of Northcom was spelled out. But as I said, Canadian participation in Northcom is a whole new ball game and I'm having a hard time taking both the poll and the story at face value. I think we're being spun. Or set up. All the more reason to encourage an open, public debate on this so we know exactly what we would be getting in to. Unfortunately, the Liberals seem to be working hard to avoid that debate.
I did note this, also towards the end of the National Post story:
Despite the potential political problems, the government is aware that Canadian firms would lose out on $10-billion of lucrative high-technology contracts and the jobs that would flow from working on the land-, sea- and space-based anti-missile system if Canada refused to participate.
The last time I posted about Afghanistan, it was to draw attention to accusations that the Bush administration, acting through its ambassador, was attempting to exert undue influence in the upcoming presidential election which takes place on Oct. 9th. According to Human Rights Watch (via Melanie at Bump), Bush and company aren't the only ones.
In the run-up to the October 9 presidential election in Afghanistan, warlord factions continue to threaten voters, candidates and political organizers, Human Rights Watch said in a report released today. These human rights abuses are jeopardizing the integrity of the country?s first national election.The 52-page report, ?The Rule of the Gun: Human Rights Abuses and Political Repression in the Run-Up to Afghanistan?s Presidential Election,? documents how human rights abuses are fueling a pervasive atmosphere of repression and fear in many parts of the country. The report explains how voters in many areas of the country do not understand the ballot or have faith in its secrecy, and how they face threats and are offered bribes from militia factions.
One Afghan political organizer told Human Rights Watch that the militia factions said, ?Why are you doing what you?re doing? Why do you oppose the mujahidin? Why are you writing articles calling us warlords? These articles are endangering your life.?
?The warlords are still calling the shots,? said Brad Adams, Asia director at Human Rights Watch. ?Many voters in rural areas say the militias have already told them how to vote, and that they?re afraid of disobeying them. Activists and political organizers who oppose the warlords fear for their lives.?
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The report discusses several flaws in the voter-registration process and the administration of the election itself, including the widespread multiple registration of voters. As noted in the report, it is likely that the number of registered voters cited by most Afghan and international officials?more than 10 million, including more than 4 million women?is inaccurate. (On October 4, Human Rights Watch will release a report on Afghanistan specifically focusing on women?s participation in the election and civil society in general.)
In the report released today, Human Rights Watch also discusses the failure of the international community and Afghan government to organize an adequate election-observation effort. As the report notes, most of the polling sites will not be adequately monitored. Because security remains a problem through most of the country, only a handful of properly trained and independent monitors will be deployed.
?Many abuses in the crucial pre-election period and on election day won?t even be discovered?because there won?t be anyone out there to report on them,? said Adams. ?How can such an important election have such an anemic observation effort??
Is it fair to hold the US solely responsible for the outcome in Afghanistan? Maybe not. But they led the charge. Bush was the one who committed to giving Afghanistan the support it would need to rebuild and emerge as a better country. When others in the international community expressed support and committed resources to taking the Taliban down, it was based on that commitment. And Bush is the one who then distracted everyone from carrying on with the job by insisting that Saddam Hussein could only be dealt with by all-out war and that it needed to be done immediately. Neither of those assertions has been borne out.
The neocons wanted to remake the Middle East. So far all they seem to be doing is leaving a trail of failed states behind them. The fact that they may have worked hard to achieve that result seems like cold comfort.
This is another installment in an on-going discussion about the Canadian health care system. An index of all the posts from both Bound by Gravity and this blog can be found here.
In Andrew's post Public/Private Health Care, he wrote:
... a private health company that provided consistently poor service would quickly gain a bad reputation, lose customers (patients), and go out of business. In our current system we have no such method of showing our displeasure - we're stuck with the government's service whether we like it or not.
I can't resist this. A word to the wise, Andrew. Don't talk about losing patients in this context. It tends to evoke a different image than the one you may have intended.
But seriously, folks. When you suggest that a private company that provided poor service would lose customers, you're making the implicit assumption that those customers have somewhere else to go. The theory is that if a private company doesn't keep its customers satisfied, it's creating an opportunity for someone else to come into the market. But while it's true that there's an opportunity, there's no imperative.
Once upon a time there was a software company that offered innovative products at reasonable prices and I was once a satisfied customer. Over the years it was quite successful and became a dominating force in its market niches. Along the way it learned the trick of buying up competitors and achieving a virtual monopoly in some of the niches it occupies.
In more recent years it's shown all the signs of the arrogance that develops when a monopoly is in private hands. Some of its products require regular updates to the data on which they rely. The company has been able to take advantage of this to bundle product upgrades with the data and to foist an unpopular subscription pricing model on its customers. So now customers are upgrading whether they need to or not and paying for the privilege. At the same time the company is gaining a reputation for buggy releases and slow response with bug fixes. It becomes the customer's problem rather than the company's, though, because free technical support is history. That, too, is available only on a subscription basis unless you get really firm (read nasty) with their service people.
Acting on a customer's behalf, I recently witnessed this company insist on being paid for a tech support call which occurred because the new version of the product wouldn't install on a version of Windows for which the company's documentation claimed full support. So the customer had paid for the upgrade and then had to pay again just to install the thing so he could use it.
There's probably a real opportunity here for someone with sufficient funds to spend in developing competing products and bringing them to market. I personally know of several people who would switch if there was an alternative available that supplied the functionality they depend on. But there is no alternative. Maybe there will be next year. Or in five years. Or maybe never because those with the money to invest in a startup see other opportunities with a better chance at success. There's nothing compelling anyone to go after this company's unhappy customers. There's no imperative.
If this company were to so annoy enough customers that they decided to go back to doing things manually, and they left in sufficient numbers to force the company out of business, it would be a serious problem for all those other customers who rely on the company's products to do their business. But it would just be too bad for them because, as I've said, there's no alternative.
If this was a health care concern, this company's poor service might pose a real dilemma for those patients affected by its poor service. To say that the company would lose their business assumes that the patients have an alternative. What if there is none? What if any competitors simply didn't have the capacity to absorb all of the offending company's business?
And if the offending company closed its doors, saying that it's just too bad for the patients wouldn't be acceptable. If no one had moved quickly enough to take advantage of the opportunity, then the government would have to step in because we, as a society, would deem it an imperative that the gap be filled. So now we'd have taxpayer dollars being spent under emergency conditions and we all know how that's liable to turn out.
As for Andrew's comment that ?we're stuck with the government's service whether we like it or not?, well, yeah, we are. We've decided that where a monopoly appears to be the right way to handle something, it's best left in the government's hands because the only thing worse is a monopoly in private hands. That's why we have anti-trust laws and regulatory bodies to inspect acquisitions and mergers to try to ensure that no company becomes too dominant in a market. History has taught us that when a private company has a monopoly, bad things happen (though I still yielded to the temptation to discuss that software company in case anyone needed a refresher course). When the government runs it, if we're unhappy with the job they're doing at least we can kick the bums out in four years and let someone else have a go at it. That's not something you can do with CEOs.
So having said all this, let's revisit one of Andrew's specific suggestions that I glossed over in my last post on the subject.
Allow more private for-profit hospitals and clinics to open up, under the condition that they respect the comprehensiveness, universality, and accessibility criteria of the Canada Health Act.
And when you combine the for-profit model with Andrew's other suggestion that facilities should be paid by procedure, i.e. on a piece-work basis rather receiving an annual budget, what happens to hospitals in rural areas where the population density is lower and the demand is even harder to predict year over year? Given a couple of years of relative good health for the surrounding population and that hospital might have to shut down. If we deem that unacceptable because it's imperative that health care capacity be available against the day when demand goes back up, are we then appealing to the government for extra funds in order to keep the doors open? So what have we gained?
As a society we've deemed it an imperative that, insofar as it's possible and practical, everyone is to have access to an equal level of care without regard to the ability to pay. While market forces bring imperatives of their own, such as controlling costs and maintaining quality, there is no imperative to enter a market or to stay in a market regardless of the opportunity that market may represent. And the imperative to maximize profit can run directly counter to the imperative to maintain capacity that may not be used at times, and may not be used at all but could be critical should the need for it arise.
Given the imperative represented by the Canada Health Act, it seems to me that we have to choose very carefully where and how we would allow market forces to operate in the health care system. We would have to monitor capacity and the demand for services to ensure that capacity doesn't drop below certain levels even if the opportunities aren't attracting anyone to take advantage of them or if maintaining the capacity deemed necessary cuts into the profit margin. We would have to ensure that services that don't represent any opportunity at all, or too little opportunity (or too high a risk) to attract a private sector supplier, would still be provided if needed. And we would have to be prepared at any time to step in if market forces aren't fulfulling the overriding imperative. I can't help but wonder if it isn't more trouble than it's worth.
No, not John Kerry. Our esteemed federal Revenue Minister John McCallum.
Liberals bent rules to appoint mail CEO
The new Martin government broke its own rules designed to clean up the hiring process for Crown Corporations this week by giving Revenue Minister John McCallum the green light to hire a former colleague as Canada Post's new chairman.Mr. McCallum quietly announced late Thursday afternoon that Gordon Feeney had been named chairman of the Crown agency. Mr. Feeney is a retired deputy chairman of Royal Bank of Canada and worked with Mr. McCallum when the minister was vice- president and chief economist at the bank.
But, in the appointment of Mr. Feeney, at least two of Mr. Alcock's four steps were ignored. No outside recruitment firm was hired and the job was not advertised, as the new process demanded. Nor was the selection of Mr. Feeney submitted to a parliamentary committee.A nominating committee was struck to find names of appropriate candidates, which Canada Post's board of directors approved and submitted to the Revenue Minister, who is responsible for the agency.
"I selected one of those names. I informed the opposition critics prior to any decision. It was submitted to cabinet. Cabinet passed it," Mr. McCallum said. Going to a recruitment firm would have cost taxpayers more money and delayed the process, he added. "Given the urgency of the task, I didn't see the need to spend additional money and additional time."
But the really good bit of spin was earlier in the article when McCallum tried to claim that the process used was "in the spirit of the guidelines." I don't think so, John.
The point of going to an outside recruitment firm and advertising the position is to allow for applications from people outside the immediate knowledge of the key players in the government and the corporation in question. It allows for the entry of new blood. It might also help prevent both the appearance and the fact of partisanship in the crown managements, something which certainly sounds like a blessing given recent events. So hiring someone you know without even considering candidates who might have surfaced during a proper search is hardly "in the spirit" of the new process.
For all I know Gordon Feeney may be a perfect fit for the job. But methinks McCallum is full of something here and it isn't the milk of human kindness. He's also pretty tone deaf. He just doesn't seem to understand what rubs us all the wrong way about the sponsorship scandal. It's called cronyism and the stink of it is just as bad now as it was before the last election.
Parliament resumes on Monday. Aren't we off to a good start?
Remember the PATRIOT Act? That's the controversial piece of legislation that the US passed following 9/11. It's controversial because it gave law enforcement sweeping new powers. And notice that I said "following" 9/11 and not "as a result of". It followed the terrorist attack so quickly that's it hard to believe that the bulk of the act wasn't already written with its authors just waiting for an opportunity to push it through.
Do you have a Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce Visa card? If so, the FBI might soon be getting to know you better. And you won't even know it's happening.
U.S. law could open millions of Canadian Visa records
A small sheet of paper slipped in with the bills of millions of Canadian Visa cardholders has sparked an investigation by Canada's Privacy Commissioner and calls for the federal government to stand up for the privacy rights of its citizens.Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce Visa customers were sent an amendment to their cardholder agreement this month warning their financial information could be disclosed in accordance with U.S. laws.
...
In recent years both CIBC and RBC Financial have outsourced their credit card operations to a Georgia-based company called Total System Services Inc., which means that Canadian cardholder information now falls under U.S. legislation.
... CIBC spokesperson Susan McDougall said yesterday the notice sent to cardholders did not indicate any changes in the way information is handled."Nothing in the Patriot Act or any other post-9/11 legislation has altered CIBC's relationship with its service provider or the types of information it processes," she said.
"CIBC decided to update the privacy provisions in its cardholder agreement, in order to provide more detailed disclosure about our collection, use and disclosure of personal information. There is no new legislation behind the amendments."
NDP MP Brian Masse seems to be leading the charge on behalf of our privacy, criticizing the Canadian government for being complacent by not challenging controversial American legislation. But I'm not sure what the government could do short of making it illegal for the banks to outsource their processing to American companies. And wouldn't that run afoul of NAFTA?
Meanwhile, what took the CIBC so long? The PATRIOT Act was passed nearly three years ago. Did it take them this long to figure out the ramifications of doing business with a company in Georgia and inform their customers what it really means?
As to what it really means:
Masse ... says Canadians are now affected by Section 215 of the U.S. Patriot Act, which was enacted a month after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, and greatly expands the powers of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.A lawsuit launched by the American Civil Liberties Union, currently before the U.S. District Court in Michigan, strives to have that section of the act ruled unconstitutional.
"To obtain a Section 215 order, the FBI need only assert that the records or personal belongings are `sought for' an ongoing foreign intelligence, counterintelligence, or international terrorism investigation," the lawsuit says.
"The FBI is not required to show probable cause ? or any reason ? to believe that the target of the order is a criminal suspect or foreign agent."
To those of you who are affected by this, welcome to John Ashcroft's War on Privacy™. Here's hoping the ACLU pulls this one off.