June 2006 Archives

My favourite Canada Day story involves my nephew (franco-Mum/anglo-Dad) who proudly told me on that day when he was 10 or 11 years old: "Mon oncle, je suis canadien sans-tiret!" ("Uncle, I'm an unhyphenated Canadian!"). 'Nuff said.
Joyeux Fete du Canada! - Happy Canada Day!

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macadavy
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My guilty secret: I have a rogue Red Tory gene wandering about inside me somewhere, and this holiday brings it out. I can't hold it back, so here goes: It's Dominion Day! Dominion Day!

Have a wonderful holiday. I may return with cucumbers.
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skdadl
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I will be having the most Canadian of Canada Days. I will ride on a Canada Day Parade float with my two children, all of us in our red-and-white wardrobes, flinging red-and-white peppermints at the crowd lining the streets. Then we will pack up and head to our cabin by a beautiful blue northern lake for two days of fun in the sun. If that doesn't make me feel Canadian enough, I'm going to pig out on Coffee Crisps while I lounge around in my plaid lumberjack shirt watching old reruns of Seeing Things with the volume down so it doesn't drown out the Guess Who tunes playing on my MP3 player. Ahhhh...it's a sweet life, people. Happy Canada Day.
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Tim
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It has wrinkle here and a wart there. It isn't perfect, but there is no place we would rather live. Happy Birthday Canada. Celebrate it, eh!
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mahigan
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I've refrained on commenting on the alleged Conservative convention fee brouhaha because the issue looked to be fairly murky. Now it appears that things are getting cleared up a bit, and the picture that's forming doesn't look good for Stephen Harper's party.

OTTAWA (CP) - While Prime Minister Stephen Harper and his Conservative party continued to insist they're on the right side of financing laws, former party officials and experts said they have a completely different understanding of the rules.

Harper told reporters Friday that his party followed financing rules when it didn't publicly disclose fees paid to attend a March 2005 convention - an amount that could represent as much as $1.7 million.

Chief Electoral Officer Jean-Pierre Kingsley has now asked to examine the party's financial records around the convention. The Liberals want the money from the convention fees put into a trust fund until Kingsley's review is over.

"All the laws have been obeyed and the Liberals will have to obey them as well - that's the tough part," Harper said as he left an event to promote the lowering of the GST.

Oooh, nice little parting shot against the Liberals, there Stephen, but I am afraid that despite your insistance, it's is looking more and more like you guys did indeed break the law, or, to put it in terms your party would use were this a Liberal or NDP issue, built a culture of corruption and entitlement that led you to believe you were above the law. Despite the Cons protestations of innocence, past bigwigs from the Conservative Party's previous incarnations say the PM is spouting nonsense.

When I sat down this morning to scan the front page of the Globe and Mail, the good grey Globe, Canada's national newspaper, defender of all that is stiff-necked and proper and conventional but sometimes vital to the defence of our civil liberties, publisher of the best letters column in the country (mainly because most of the people who write letters to the Globe obviously disagree entirely with its conservative editorial slant), I aspirated my coffee at the sight of this article with this title: "Hateful chatter behind the veil."

The article is about the online conversations of four of the wives of the seventeen men and boys arrested earlier this month in Toronto as suspects in an alleged terrorist plot. I have no interest at all in quoting or unpacking the content of their Internet posts. I've read them; you can read them; they are a long way from being the first and worst problem we face now.

These are some of the same women who were swarmed by media cameras three weeks ago as they tried to catch a first glimpse of loved ones held melodramatically incommunicado after the melodramatically staged and publicized arrests. "See the burkas! Look at those burkas!" The media couldn't get enough of shoving their cameras at the women in the veils, and the msm editors and producers couldn't have run those photos any more sensationally than they did.

Why? Seriously: why? These women are accused by our justice system of nothing. They are the wives, sisters, mothers, daughters of men and boys who are alleged to have engaged in terrorist conspiracies. They are also, according to our legal, constitutional, and social consensus, fully independent human beings and entitled to respect as such. A few of them seem to have written about politics with great intensity online -- so unlike our own behaviour, or that of anyone we know or have read on blogs or message boards, yes? One of them has written that it is not unthinkable that Muslims in Canada could be rounded up and interned just as the Japanese were during the Second World War, and the Globe editors considered that (to me) reasonably fearful observation worthy of a sensationalizing highlighted sidebar in the print edition.

How long would it take you to round up all the clumsy, bigoted, paranoid, or just plain bizarre statements that you've read online over, say, the last five years? I thought so, and I wouldn't bother either. Have you never read a WASPy teenager brushing off the very idea of loyalty to Canada, to any nation-state? I thought so, and yes, that bothers me too, but when did you last see the Globe profiling those kids on the front page? And that Globe title: Is that where you last heard hateful chatter? From behind a veil? How would the Globe caption a front-page story on Ann Coulter? "Hateful chatter in strappy basic black"? Or on the Christian fundamentalists who are hoping that a conflagration in the Middle East, however many millions it kills, will lead to the Second Coming? "Hateful chatter behind the leisure suits and shirtwaists"?

Why is anyone's wife a front-page story in the Globe and Mail at this late date in our civilization? Why? I was personally very moved to see Tarek Fatah, the communications director of the Muslim Canadian Congress and a hard-line social-democratic opponent of anyone's cultural essentialism (as I know well, from our scandalous debates online), step forward on that day that the cameras were aimed so aggressively, so salaciously, at the frightened women whose veils had ceased to protect them, had instead made them prey for our voracious media, and declare, as he did, "Enough." This is wrong. It is wrong. And if we let it go on any longer, we will all be consumed by the bonfire that is being lit for our liberties.

I'm no fan of long driving trips, but sometimes, a journey is simply irresistible, even if it will consist of long hours on the road and very little time spent doing anything else. When my friend Mac asked me to drive to Salmon Arm, BC to pick up a herd of alpacas (and two llamas) for the hobby farm he is starting at his acreage, I couldn’t say no. First, I had never been to BC, and a driving trip would give me the full visual experience, if not much else. Second, who wouldn’t want to pick up a herd of alpacas? How often does that opportunity arise outside of Peru?

Knowing we would be on the road for at least 48 hours, our friend Amy, a driving machine, volunteered to come with us and to be in charge of the music. This would be the soundtrack to our journey, she said, and she loaded her MP3 player with 700 songs from her immense collection. As we set out from our tiny Northern community after work on June 23, she felt the journey had to start with the Greatest Driving Song of All Time.

I've been drivin' all night, my hand's wet on the wheel
There's a voice in my head that drives my heel
It's my baby callin', says I need you here
And it's half past four and I'm shifting gear

Canwest Global is planning to pull out of the Canadian Press, the non-profit co-operative that has provided news from every corner of Canada for the past 89 years. And why would they do that, I wonder?

Scott Anderson, vice-president of editorial for CanWest Media Works Publications, said the company would probably shift those funds into its own service.

“We have some pretty good ideas about what we would like to do with our own service, to serve our readers, if we have this money available,” Mr. Anderson said.

Ah, their very owns news service. CP stories were occasionally crappy, often excellent and consistently non-ideological. Anyone have any faith that the Canwest news service will be a politically neutral source of news?

Sympatico's customers warned of privacy loss

One of Canada's largest Internet service providers is warning its customers that Big Brother is lurking online, with the federal government expected to revive an Internet surveillance bill.

If the legislation is reintroduced, it could allow police unfettered access to personal information without a warrant, experts warn.

Bell Sympatico has informed its customers that it intends to "monitor or investigate content or your use of your service provider's networks and to disclose any information necessary to satisfy any laws, regulations or other governmental request.''

Bell Sympatico's new customer service agreement, which took effect June 15, is a clear signal the telecommunications industry expects the Conservative government to revive the surveillance law, said Michael Geist, an Internet law professor at the University of Ottawa.

"Everybody expects it's going to be reintroduced,'' Geist said in an interview. "If anything, (the new bill) will be a hardened approach.''

I've said it before but it bears repeating: I expect law enforcement agencies to ask for too much. They do have a tough job and it's human nature for them to identify and lobby for things that will make that job easier. The role of government is to apply a healthy amount of skepticism and to balance law enforcement's demands against the civil rights of individual citizens. I think the Liberals failed in that regard in the days following 9/11 and I don't expect any better from the Harper government. They're more than welcome to surprise me.

To a certain extent, the recent faux hysteria that erupted following the arrest of the Toronto 17 was just that: manufactured to create the right climate for legislation like that under discussion here. It also provided an opportunity for the Conservatives to muse out loud about playing games with the definition of "terrorist" and to suggest that parliamentary oversight on the most controversial aspects of bill C-36 -- the anti-terrorism legislation passed in the wake of 9/11 -- isn't necessary.

So far, I'm not surprised. That's not a good thing.

School's out in Ottawa, and the kids are off on their summer holidays. This term a few even got extensions and didn't have to sit their final exams:

[Ethics Commissioner Bernard] Shapiro gave Finance Minister Jim Flaherty and Labour Minister Jean-Pierre Blackburn extensions beyond the 120-day limit to meet the requirements of the ethics code, allowing them to avoid questions about their personal holdings before the House of Commons breaks for the summer.

The delays come as two other cabinet ministers, Health Minister Tony Clement and Heritage Minister Bev Oda, attempt to deflect conflict-of-interest allegations over personal holdings they listed in their ethics declarations.

Under the conflict-of-interest code, cabinet ministers have 60 days after appointment to make a confidential report to Shapiro that lists their personal assets, liabilities and income. They have another 60 days to comply with his instructions for arranging their affairs and make the reports public. That made June 4 the cut-off date.

What made these four cases especially piquant was the Commons approval on Wednesday of the Harper government's much vaunted Accountability Act, the ethics legislation meant to hammer home to Canadians yet again the many sins of previous Liberal regimes. Now, nobody is doubting that some Liberals have in the past been miserable sinners, that the "natural governing party" as a whole suffers from a supersized sense of entitlement, but as the Globe and Mail pointed out yesterday in an editorial on the Gotcha Act, aka the Holier Than Thou Act, it seems to take a trickster to know a trickster:

... when the squawking comes from within their own party, the Tories are more flexible. Mr. Harper decided to make people who have left senior public office wait five years before lobbying the government -- a much longer period than necessary to achieve the goal of keeping them honest. But when he included members of his transition team, the people who helped him move into government, all hell broke loose. Team members said they wouldn't have helped out if they had known the consequences. So, just as the Commons was passing the bill, the Conservatives slipped in a section especially for that team, giving members special grounds on which to appeal to the lobbying commissioner for exemption from the restriction.

One measure of the new act seems especially mean: it would appear to prevent anyone who has thus far supported a Liberal leadership candidate to the tune of more than six bucks from attending the December convention as a delegate to, y'know, support her/his candidate. Sure, snicker if you like (I did, briefly), but doesn't that seem a little beady-eyed and purse-lipped and narrow to you? It does to me.

On the very day they were at their most pure, however, there arose from the Conservative caucus a deafening silence on the subject of their own ethical entanglements. No one quite knows yet what could be keeping Mr Flaherty and Mr Blackburn, although won't it be interesting to find out? In, ah, mid-August? About Mr Clement and Ms Oda, though, we already know quite a bit.

If you're reading this blogpost right now, do you think you could go away and do something else for an hour?

Alternatively, and if you're not worried about work-safe entertainment, please feel free to stare at our redundant if titillating simulcast. We're sure you'll understand why we're doing this.

Kirstine Layfield, the CBC's new executive director of network programming, ... defended the public network's decision to push The National back an hour [for an American Idol knockoff reality show] as part of a bigger plan to create a strong lead-in for the venerable, but cash-strapped, newscast when more people are watching in the fall. "This is a huge opportunity for us, and we're looking at it as a long-term strategy.

There was a lot of internal discussion on how to handle this."

Us too! Boy, you should have heard our internal discussions!

Mansbridge said simply, ... "It's crazy when you're trying to commit to an audience that you're on at a certain time. It undermines the broadcast. There were occasions this spring where I had to talk to correspondents in the field who are literally risking their lives to cover stories for us, and say, 'Look we're not on time tonight and your piece is not going to be seen by as many people as normal because the time has changed.'

Now, that sounds just like pogge. We overruled him, of course.

I fought with the title of this post for a bit but this one seemed to cover more bases better.

Are you happy with your factory farmed, genetically engineered food supply? If you are, you're just going to love this story.

Test Tube Meat Nears Dinner Table
What if the next burger you ate was created in a warm, nutrient-enriched soup swirling within a bioreactor?

Edible, lab-grown ground chuck that smells and tastes just like the real thing might take a place next to Quorn at supermarkets in just a few years, thanks to some determined meat researchers. Scientists routinely grow small quantities of muscle cells in petri dishes for experiments, but now for the first time a concentrated effort is under way to mass-produce meat in this manner.

Henk Haagsman, a professor of meat sciences at Utrecht University, and his Dutch colleagues are working on growing artificial pork meat out of pig stem cells. They hope to grow a form of minced meat suitable for burgers, sausages and pizza toppings within the next few years.

Tim Harper has an interesting piece in today's Star on how Americans and Canadians have reacted differently to the so-called "war on terror."

People are more afraid of terror than having their privacy violated," says Tomasso, chair of the New Hampshire Liberty Alliance. "For so long the rhetoric has been about fear, not hope and more traditional American values."

"Live Free or Die" is not just a cheesy licence plate slogan in this tiny New England state. But even New Hampshire is not immune to the national erosion of civil liberties that has permeated every part of the United States since terrorists forced their way into airline cockpits almost five years ago, taking away a nation's bravado and replacing it with fear.

The exploitation of that fear by an administration intent on inflating the powers of the presidency, at the expense of a cowed Congress and with the tacit approval of an anxious nation, may be a cautionary tale for Canadians should some of that U.S.-style fear find its way north of the border in the wake of Toronto's recent terrorism arrests.

In recent years, it has become a truism that Americans will trade away some liberties because they have been attacked. Canadians have not.

But where is that rugged U.S. individuality that had helped define this nation?

"Canadians, over the past couple of decades, appear to be much more aware of civil liberties. They have the balance just about right between the sense of community and individualism," says Phillip Cooper, an expert on separation of powers at Portland State University in Oregon.

"I hope this politics of fear doesn't gravitate across the border. One hopes that your country won't see the polarization we have here. Canadians look down here and see this U.S. individuality, but it has become a fearful, combative individuality."

$250M boost for security

Prime Minister Stephen Harper announced spending yesterday aimed at preventing a terrorist attack on Canadian soil similar to those that have occurred overseas.

The money is not new, but is being shelled out of the $1.4-billion the Conservatives allocated in the recent budget to enhance national security.

Except for the part where they didn't.

The Liberals were always really good at announcing the same money over and over again. It seems that's one policy the Conservatives are happy to adopt. And the media just play along.

Posted also by mahigan

The first news out of the recent Canada 2020 Conference was both provocative and entertaining in that Rick Mercerish way that works so well on Canadians. Michael Adams of Environics, everyone's favourite pollster of the popular culture, has discovered all over again yet another way in which we are not, y'know, them.

The new line dividing Canadians from Americans seems to be drawn according to responses to the statement "The father of the family must be the master of his own house":

In 1992, 26 per cent of Canadians said they agreed ... In 2005, only 18 per cent of Canadians agree with that notion, according to Adams' numbers.

By contrast, 42 per cent of Americans agreed with that statement in 1992. But by 2005, more than half of Americans — 52 per cent — said that dad must be the boss at home.

We are not underestimating the political importance to Canadians of recognizing that socio-cultural divide. We would like to be glad that "conference attendees were excited by the Adams' finding":

They believed it underscores the idea that Canadians are far more wary overall of authoritarianism, hierarchy and other hallmarks of conservative politics.

Some pundits, in fact, have taken to calling Prime Minister Stephen Harper "big daddy" for his tough, highly centralized style of governing since he took office in February.

But then we took a closer look at the conference attendees and their main agenda, and we began to wonder whether they truly love us for our wary, anti-authoritarian, anti-hierarchical, and thus anti-patriarchal, anti-imperialist, and anti-deep-integrationist selves.

From Yahoo News:

A blueprint for trying to start a war between the United States and Iran was among a "huge treasure" of documents found in the hideout of terrorist leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, Iraqi officials said Thursday. The document, purporting to reflect al-Qaida policy and its cooperation with groups loyal to ousted President Saddam Hussein, also appear to show that the insurgency in Iraq was weakening.
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According to the summary, insurgents were being weakened by operations against them and by their failure to attract recruits. To give new impetus to the insurgency, they would have to change tactics, it added.

"We mean specifically attempting to escalate the tension between America and Iran, and American and the Shiite in Iraq," it quoted the documents as saying, especially among moderate followers of Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the most influential Shiite cleric in Iraq.

From The Raw Story:

Current military and former intelligence officials remain concerned about a US-led strike on Iran, despite the recent appearance of diplomacy on the part of the US State Department and the offer of an incentives package to Iran.

Officials point to new developments, such as a recent meeting in Rome between an Iranian arms dealer and controversial neoconservative Michael Ledeen and the March creation of the Iranian directorate inside the Pentagon, as examples of recent events similar to the lead up with war in Iraq.

(Aside: This of course assumes that the documents attributed to al-Zarqawi are anything more than forgeries planted for propaganda purposes. There have been a lot of interesting documents that have been "discovered" in Iraq over the last few years that cause headlines one day and then seem to disappear the next.)

One of the people whose knowledge and understanding of Afghanistan I most respect is a qualified supporter of Canada's current engagement there under the aegis of NATO. His answer to anyone who questions our commitment to what is now a hot war: "Where was Canada after the Soviet withdrawal in 1989? Where was the West when we still had a serious chance to rebuild the country peacefully? Who paid attention before the blowback from outside meddling in the eighties became catastrophic?"

So this isn't a post about Afghanistan. It is a reminder of another place where wrong-headed outside meddling, some of it looking awfully familiar, is setting the stage for blowback that could become catastrophic. The people who live there are already living with catastrophe, but of the kind that usually merits no more than a sidebar squib in most North American newspapers.

Last week the news from Somalia made headlines for a few days when an Islamic militia called the Islamic Courts Union finally took control of Mogadishu after a months-long battle with secular warlords that had killed hundreds by the end of May. That confrontation continues around the capital city and may be spreading; since April I've found the current battles easiest to follow through the almost daily reports in the Guardian and Reuters.

As in Afghanistan, complex reality in Somalia defeats easy generalization. The Transitional Federal Government (TFG), based in the city of Baidoa, is too new, too shaky, too divided itself to return to Mogadishu. The Bush administration, projecting the oversimplifications of the War on Terror on to a maze of variously motivated networks, has upped the ante by helping to create and then by backing an untrustworthy coalition of warlords. A year ago the International Crisis Group produced this overview of the situation, already a crisis then:

... in the rubble-strewn streets of the ruined capital of this state without a government, Mogadishu, al-Qaeda operatives, jihadi extremists, Ethiopian security services and Western-backed counter-terrorism networks are engaged in a shadowy and complex contest waged by intimidation, abduction and assassination. The U.S. has had some success but now risks evoking a backlash ...

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Since 2003, Somalia has witnessed the rise of a new, ruthless, independent jihadi network with links to al-Qaeda. Based in lawless Mogadishu and led by a young militia leader trained in Afghanistan, the group announced its existence by murdering four foreign aid workers in the relatively secure territory of Somaliland between October 2003 and April 2004. Western governments, led by the U.S., responded to the threat of terrorism in and from Somalia by building up Somali counter-terrorist networks headed by faction leaders and former military or police officers, and by cooperating with the security services in Somaliland and neighbouring Puntland. The strategy has netted at least one key al-Qaeda figure, and as many as a dozen members of the new jihadi group are either dead or behind bars.

Despite these successes, counter-terrorism efforts are producing growing unease within the broader public. Few Somalis believe there are terrorists in their country, and many regard the American-led war on terrorism as an assault on Islam. Unidentified surveillance flights, the abduction of innocent people for weeks at a time on suspicion of terrorist links, and cooperation with unpopular faction leaders all add to public cynicism and resentment. Without public support, even the most sophisticated counter-terrorism effort is doomed to failure.

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... the dirty war between terrorists and counter-terrorist operatives in Mogadishu appears to have entered a new and more vicious stage that threatens to push the country further towards jihadism and extremist violence unless its root causes are properly addressed ...

The threat of jihadi terrorism in and from Somalia is real. But attempts by the new Somali leadership and its regional allies to exploit this threat for short-term political gain risk plunging the country into even greater crisis. Several key leaders in the deeply divided transitional government are notorious for smearing adversaries and critics with allegations of terrorist linkages -- conduct that threatens to deepen the schisms within the government.

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A successful counter-terrorism campaign requires more engagement with the broader public, including civil society organisations and more moderate Islamist groups. Somalis must be persuaded not only that some individuals guilty of terrorism are indeed in their country but also that the counter-terrorism agenda does not involve subjugation by factional or foreign interests. At the same time, Somalia's partners must become involved with the peace process, helping to overcome the TFG schisms and to forge a genuine government of national unity. If they fail to do so, jihadis will gradually find growing purchase among Somalia's despairing and disaffected citizenry, and it will only be a matter of time before another group of militants succeeds in mounting a spectacular terrorist attack against foreign interests in Somalia or against one of its neighbours.

I've been tagged by the boss. (See below.) Unaccustomed though I am to public speaking, here I go with eight random things about moi:

1. I once worked for a day in the office of a numismatist. When he explained to me what UNCs and BUNCs were, I was seized by an overpowering desire to squeeze each one of them between my thumb and middle finger. That isn't what ended my numismatic career, though. My dad refused to sign the legal guarantee I was sent home with that night, which was probably best all 'round.

2. I credit my good health, for as long as I had it, to peanut butter or its smarter younger brother, tahini.

3. I have six cats, two sisters, and two brothers, and I am on astonishingly good terms with all of them.

4. The greatest movie I have ever seen, I still think, is The Third Man.

5. I am proud of my Arctic blue willow to the point of vanity. The rest of the garden may be going to seed, but that gorgeous bush encourages me every day.

6. I love turtles. Wombats and meerkats are good too. And I could go on.

7. Filing defeats me. Filing makes me anxious to the point of paralysis. Life is a filing cabinet, and I've lost the key.

8. I have the best tech adviser in the world.

I tag MWW at Somena Media, Miss Vicky, and April Reign.

It seems I've been tagged with the latest blog meme which involves me telling you eight random things about myself.

1. I hate lima beans.

2. I once memorized all of The Walrus and the Carpenter.

3. I once had a Toronto Telegram paper route. I never seemed to make any money at it.

4. I have a weakness for old westerns and I was really surprised when no one got my Magnificent Seven reference.

5. I haven't had a working television for about three years.

6. I haven't been inside a Wal-Mart since 1990.

7. I don't really say "eh" a lot in the course of normal conversation.

8. I hate doing the dishes.

I tag skdadl, Declan and James Bow.

Has anyone else noticed? In the quietest, most comfortable, most familiar and secure, most geologically inactive corner of the op-ed page of the Globe and Mail, faint signals have lately been detected of a minor reawakening.

The closest to funny that Jeffrey Simpson has come for a long time has been his weekend chats with Uncle Fred, who lives on Vancouver Island and is in fact not all that funny. Uncle Fred reads like something dreamed up by a journalist so accustomed to having access that he has himself morphed into a mandarin. The tragedy of the journalist-as-mandarin is that his notions of "ordinary Canadians" are likely to be even cornier than he thinks ordinary Canadians are, and that has seemed to be the sad fate of our Jeffrey through the years of the Liberal ascendancy.

But. Could Jeffrey be getting ready to rumble? In recent weeks his aim on all sorts of people has been sharpening, and so has his prose. He has gone beyond grumpy over the field of Liberal leadership candidates. He doesn't especially like any at the front of the pack, not Gerard Kennedy (bad French) and not Bob Rae (baggage from his days as premier). For sure Simpson does not like Michael Ignatieff; above all he has been sniping at Ignatieff, and that is interesting. Why would Jeffrey Simpson be so bothered by Michael Ignatieff (I ask in all innocence)? And what might that signify?

Simpson's column in today's paper is a lot of fun. It is a wee volcanic emission that we can only hope presages full-scale eruptions in the days and months to come. It's not about the Liberal leadership candidates, but it is a heartening show of real temper. Jeffrey Simpson is mad as hell at Air Canada, and he's not going to take it any more:

Why are Air Canada employees not more helpful? They're not bad people. Some of them are very nice.

But you get the distinct impression that they've been beaten into a sullen submission by the salary cuts and job losses. They see the senior executives — CEO Robert Milton and president Montie Brewer — sitting on huge stock option gains, while the employees get nothing. The old Canada Post's problems were union-driven, Air Canada's come from the very top.

...

The employees have been pulverized. They don't feel very good about their company. They're earning less. They've got so many rules and regulations to follow, and they've been stripped of so much discretion in the drive for profits, and so much is out of their hands, that even if they'd like to help, they often can't. It's not their fault.

Attitudes start at the top.

Lose your baggage. Try phoning the local Air Canada office at the airport. Or drive to the airport to enquire about the luggage.

The baggage people will be very nice and quite unhelpful. Not because they want to be unhelpful, but because Air Canada has outsourced all baggage inquiries to India. Try phoning the 1-888 number. The Indians sitting in front of a computer screen will render you all assistance short of help.

...

... you go to the airport, as required, 60 minutes before a connector flight for one going overseas. You find the departure time has been advanced by 15 minutes without anyone telling you.

No sweat, there's still 45 minutes. Except the line isn't moving. You wait patiently 10 minutes and inquire why. Computers are down. You go to another counter, having now not budged for 15 minutes, only to be told the flight has closed.

Just call the gate, the Air Canada representative is asked.

There's plenty of time. Can't, she replies. Rules. Her supervisor, a man who has seen it all and couldn't care less about your fate, takes over.

Will he help?

No, Air Canada doesn't own the computers. The airport does.

Therefore, Air Canada is not responsible. He can book you tomorrow.

You try to understand: Air Canada doesn't own the computers, farms out baggage to India, takes away food, screws up a lot of flights, doesn't apologize, in the previous three weeks has cancelled two flights and re-routed you on another so that you arrive almost four hours late — yet says it wants “customer loyalty.”

Mr Simpson, you're cute when you're mad.

Defeat for net neutrality backers

US politicians have rejected attempts to enshrine the principle of net neutrality in legislation.
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The rejection of the principle of net neutrality came during a debate on the wide-ranging Communications Opportunity, Promotion and Enhancement Act (Cope Act).

Among other things, this aims to make it easier for telecoms firms to offer video services around America by replacing 30,000 local franchise boards with a national system overseen by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC).

Representative Fred Upton, head of the House telecommunications subcommittee, said competition could mean people save $30 to $40 each month on their net access fees.

An amendment to the Act tried to add clauses that would demand net service firms treat equally all the data passing through their cables.

The amendment was thought to be needed after the FCC ripped up its rules that guaranteed net neutrality.
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The amendment was defeated by 269 votes to 152 and the Cope Act was passed by 321-101 votes.

I'm with stageleft on this one. The We Are Not Afraid campaign looks to me like nothing so much as a backhanded way to hype the threat. While we're all wearing our shiny new t-shirts and publically expressing our defiance, we'll all be more likely to think about terrorism 24/7. Which suits some people just fine. Ask yourself why that might be.

As the details emerge, the people recently arrested in Toronto on terrorism charges increasingly look like The Gang That Couldn't Shoot Straight. They had big plans to do awfully serious things but since they were incompetent enough to draw the attention of authorities almost from day one, the chances that they were actually going to pull off any of these feats were vanishingly small. That's not to say that they shouldn't be prosecuted and, if found guilty, serve their time. But let's get a grip here.

We've seen the usual rhetoric from some: they hate us for our freedoms, or values, or whatever the buzzword of the day is. In fact, bin Laden has never claimed to want to conquer North America and convert us all to Islam. If you want me to support your agenda, start by not lying to me. Of course, acknowledging what people like bin Laden have actually said would mean looking at facts instead of relentlessly repeating simplistic sound-bites.

Even a more competent group than the ones who were just arrested wouldn't pose an existential threat to democracy. They don't have that much power. But we do. We've just had an up close and personal demonstration of how close to the surface hysteria, authoritarianism, xenophobia and good old-fashioned garden variety racism are in this country. If I want to be hyper-vigilant about something, that would be a more likely candidate than the possibility that I'll be killed in a terrorist attack, which probably still rates below the possibility that I'll be struck by lightning.

The disruption of an alleged terrorist cell in Canada has given us an opportunity to see how we will react to the threat of terrorism.

Will we let fear rule our response, in the way the American's responded to the September 11 attacks? Or will we instead do the unglamorous but more effective work of actually making safer our ports and airports, and instituting sensible security guidelines that don't sacrifice our basic freedoms?

Because that is how we reacted when we actually suffered our own ghastly terrorist attack.

Federal budget passes unopposed on mix-up

Even though two federal parties had promised to vote against the Conservative government's budget, it passed Tuesday without opposition because of an apparent mix-up.
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When the May 2 budget came up for its third and final reading in the House of Commons on Tuesday morning, no one stood to speak. Because there were no apparent speakers, the budget was declared passed by unanimous consent with no recorded vote.

NDP MP Libby Davies told CBC News the mix-up happened because a Conservative MP who had been scheduled to speak first was not in the chamber.

In the ensuing confusion, Davies said the opposition legislators were waiting for the Tory MP to show up and speak before they stood up. They later learned that the budget had been dealt with, at least as far as the House of Commons was concerned.
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CBC Radio reporter Chris Hall said none of the two dozen or so MPs in the House of Commons at the time — and that included government members — appeared to realize that the budget had just been passed.

Well, it has rained a lot, all the way through May (cold) and on into June (often very warm), so the planting is late and the weeds are high.

There is also the matter of the seventeen people, twelve adults and five juveniles, arrested Friday night into Saturday morning in what seems to have been an RCMP/CSIS sting operation. Interestingly, the Toronto Star was on top of this story as the arrests were still going on, whereas the Globe and Mail print edition hit our porches naked and innocent Saturday morning, even as the Globe was racing to catch up online. The National Post claims but does not explain related "probes" and "arrests" in "the United States, Britain, Bosnia, Denmark, Sweden, and Bangladesh," apart from the story every newspaper is carrying about the two Americans now in custody whose visit to Toronto was news to American authorities until Canadian investigators monitoring their contacts here passed that intelligence on.

Since others are doing the breathless updates of that same endlessly recycled report in the Star, we thought this might be a time to agree with Greg at Sinister Thoughts:

Well, I don't speak for anyone other than myself here, but I want them handled by the book. I want them tried under our law and if they are found guilty, I want them punished like anyone else, according to our law. That's how we win. We live up to the values we espouse.

... and then to give the thread over to the independent investigations of our Constant Readers.

macadavy agrees that Sidney Blumenthal's Salon essay on the Bush "war paradigm," "War is swell," which macadavy links to in comments on an earlier post, deserves its own discussion here, along with a longer essay on the same topic, Elizabeth Drew's "Power Grab," from the current issue of the New York Review of Books (22 June 2006).

You know right away who thinks he's "the decider," don't you. What other hyper-powerful international leader talks as though he were still a kid in primary school figuring out who is the boss of whom?

Blumenthal and Drew are both writing about the constitutional crisis that should be but seems not to be materializing in the U.S., in spite of the Bush administration's clear determination to cherry-pick legislation passed by Congress and to assert the primacy of executive power over that of the legislative and judicial branches of government. Blumenthal delivers a short, sharp glossary of the precepts twisted or simply invented to substitute the war paradigm for the constitutional system of checks and balances:

Some of the paradigm's expressions include Bush's fiats on the treatment of "war on terror" detainees, domestic surveillance, and international law and treaties, and his more than 750 signing statements appended to laws enacted by Congress that he claims he can implement as he chooses.

In the beginning, the elements of the war paradigm appeared to be expediencies, conceived as a series of emergency measures in the struggle against al-Qaida. But, in fact, their precepts were developed in law review articles before Sept. 11 by John Yoo, promoted to deputy assistant attorney general in the Office of Legal Counsel at the Department of Justice, where Vice President Cheney's office assigned him to write key secret memos on torture, surveillance and executive power. Once Bush approved them, the clerisy of neoconservative lawyers, at least as tightly knit as Opus Dei, put them into effect. The war paradigm is Bush's "Da Vinci Code," the difference being that its high priests acknowledge in private that it is real.

They fervently believe that the Constitution is fatally flawed and must be severely circumscribed. The Bush administration's "holy grail," another phrase officials use in private, is to remove suspects' rights to due process, speedy trial and exculpatory evidence. The war paradigm, which they contrast with a caricatured "law enforcement paradigm," is to be constantly strengthened to conduct a permanent war against terror, which can never be finally defeated. There is no exit strategy from emergency.