Working over the media has long been a staple of the right wing playbook. In the United States, three decades of constant abuse at the hands of right wingers has reduced the press to role of Republican megaphone. This has been greatly aided by years of media deregulations, which concentrated media outlets in the hands of fewer and fewr large corporations, all of whom are sympathetic to the Republicans' corporatist agenda.
In Canada, the Conservatives have also declared war on the media. This has manifested itself for years in their noted antipathy toward the CBC, which bears the black mark of being publicly funded and therefore frustratingly difficult to corrupt with vast swaths of corporate cash or promises of further industry deregulation. But most recently, this battle has been represented by the ongoing scrap with the Prime Minister's Office and the Parliamentary Press Gallery.
Background on this little scrap can be found here, but the thumbnail sketch is that the PMO decided that the PPG had no right to decide who got to ask questions of the Prime Minister, and that he would determine who did the questioning. He also decided that holding press conferences was not worht the trouble, and that he would simply go directly to friendly media outlets to ensure he got out the message he wanted. The upshot was that the PPG has been effectively removed from the political reporting process.
Today in Pressthink, a U.S. media monitoring site run out of New York University, Canadian writer and radio producer Ira Basen dissects the result of PM Stephen Harper's battle with the PPG, and sees this as the first move in undermining the mainstream media in Canada, and effectively removing it from the forum of public debate. The PPG was simply the first to fall victim to Harper's long term media strategy.
Declaring that the Ottawa gallery was biased against him, he announced that in the future, he would speak primarily to local media and other journalists of his own choosing. Reporters who made their living covering the ins and outs of Ottawa would be out. He was not prepared to cede the power to determine how Canadians viewed his new government to people who effectively saw themselves as another opposition party.One of the journalists that Harper talked to was Kevin Libin of The Western Standard, a right-wing Alberta-based newsmagazine that is arguably Harper’s biggest booster in the Canadian media. In an extraordinary interview with Libin in June, Harper spelled out his new media strategy.
The Ottawa press corps, the Prime Minister declared, was dominated by “left-wing ideologues” who were determined to stop him from getting his message out. The Gallery’s decision to boycott his press conferences clearly played right into his hand. “I’ve got more control now,” he boasted, “I’m free to pick my interviews when and where I want to have them.”
That would clearly bring short term benefits, but Harper had bigger ideas. “The real long-term effect of this may be to break up the gallery,” he declared. The public could now see the “filter” through which their news was being reported. The gallery had become “too institutionalized, and too convinced that it can control the news.” It was actually in the way of better government. “I think if we can break that up in any way, that is helpful for democracy.”
It says volumes about Harper's tumorous philosophy that he believes limiting the free press is "helpful for democracy." What this was actually all about was reducing the media role as a check on the power of the Prime Minister's Office, and the government in general. But while this is a long-term project for the Republicans in the U.S., it is a shorter-term effort for Harper, who dreams of winning a majority that will last long enough to allow him to implement his anti-government agenda with minimal resistance. Diminishing the role of the media is central to this strategy.
By now, regular readers of PressThink will be noticing the parallels. Last year, Jay Rosen wrote about the Bush administration’s strategy to de-certify the press, to rollback its power its power and influence so it would be less effective at challenging the authority of the White House.Part one of the de-certification process, according to Rosen, “is about putting journalists in a diminished pace, as in: don’t answer their questions, it only encourages the askers to think they’re legitimate interlocutors, proxies for the public. And they’re not, in the White House view.”
And in Stephen Harper’s view as well. Since breaking off contact with the Gallery in May, Harper has actually made himself available for several lengthy one on one sit-down interviews, even with media organizations he considers hostile, such as the CBC. (Video here.) Harper does well at these, articulating his positions clearly, coherently, and convincingly. Though he and George Bush share a similar political philosophy, the Prime Minister is miles ahead of the President in explaining what his government is doing and why.
But while Harper appears willing to talk to the press one on one, he clearly has no interest in holding regular press conferences, or in subjecting himself to the Parliament Hill “scrum.” For more than forty years, the scrum has been a uniquely Canadian vehicle for political accountability. The drill is that the Prime Minister or a member of his cabinet leaves the House of Commons and is swarmed by a couple of dozen reporters with cameras and microphones at the ready. The reporters proceed to pepper questions at the politician. It is unruly and often undignified, and there is little mercy shown to politicians who insist on staying “on message.” All Prime Ministers have hated the scrum, and more than one political career has been derailed by a bad scrum performance. Harper is determined that will not happen to him.
And it won't as long as he controls the message, and tight message control has been the secret to right wing electoral victory in the United States. Espousing governing philosophies that have proven to be repugnant to the majority of the electorate time and time again, the right wing succeeds with aggressive framing and language control, and then constant repetition through a well-oiled noise machine comprised of friendly newspapers, Fox News, talk radio, and even formerly mainstream media outlets that have been sufficently cowed into reinforcing the Republican frame.
Harper is already making signficant progress down this road, although the existence of such Canadian media institutions as the CBC and the Toronto Star make it a bit more diffcult for him to successfully merge or mau-mau the press into insignificance.
It is worrying that the public reaction to Harper's treatment of the media has been non-existent. Canadians are sublimely undisturbed by Harper's tactics so far, giving him a free hand to continue his efforts to control what information Canadians hear about their government.
But the real question might be how many Canadians are lucid enough to notice what’s really happening. The men and women of the Parliamentary Press Gallery are generally not sympathetic characters, and Harper took a low risk gamble when he decided to begin his assault on the press with them. In the end, few Canadians care who gets to ask questions at press conferences, and so long as the dispute continues to be framed that way, Harper’s moves will cause him little harm.But Canadians should care if their Prime Minister’s real agenda is to de-certify the press; if, like George Bush, he believes that the national media’s role in framing the democratic debate needs to be significantly reduced; if, while denouncing the press “filters,” he is actually advancing the idea that the information functions provided by his office through websites and podcasts have an equal legitimacy; and if by trying to control who gets to ask questions, and relying on sympathetic media and bloggers to get his message out, he actually believes it will “helpful for democracy.”
In the end, Stephen Harper’s efforts to rollback the press may be more sophisticated and more subtle than the in-your-face tactics employed by the Bush White House. This is Canada after all! But the consequences are no less disturbing.
Remember Harper's central premise in all this: a hobbled pet media is better for democracy than an unfettered free press. The stark unreality of that concept should send a chill through us all. Any government that wants to operate without public scrutiny is a government that has no place in the lives of Canadians, or indeed in any democracy.
From today's Toronto Star:
Norman Spector, a former Canadian ambassador to Israel and chief of staff to ex-prime minister Brian Mulroney, created a stir over the weekend when he said on the radio Belinda Stronach was a "bitch.""Bitch is a word that I would use to describe someone like Belinda Stronach," said Spector, now a political pundit.
"You know, I'm not in politics, I can say it, I think she's a bitch and I think that 90 per cent of men would probably say she's a bitch, for the way she's broken up (former Maple Leaf) Tie Domi's home and the way she dumped Peter MacKay. She is a bitch."
...
Spector also told CTV News he thinks the reason the Tory foreign affairs minister's reported reference to Stronach as a dog got major coverage was because of the number of female journalists in Ottawa.
Asked for her reaction, Stronach apparently took the high road; she says she is glad that Spector doesn't speak for Canada any more, and she suspects that he "has issues."
Me, I'm still counting the number of neuroses Spector just confessed to in that little chat. I mean, long before we get to the evil feminists, I thought everyone of Spector's vintage had at least read Ann Landers, eh? We all know that no third party ever busts up a marriage unless at least one of the partners is already ready to split, yes/no?
Now, most people might be tempted to think of Peter McKay, Tie Domi, and Norman Spector as men who have acquired marked amounts of power and/or wealth and/or public acclaim and ego-validation in this life, but Norman Spector has news for anyone who thinks so. He and those other guys, he wants us to know, are in fact pathetic victims of women who entice them away from the wives they treated so well and still long to be with, who oppress their ambitious male partners by refusing to suppress their own views for the sake of the guy's career, or who have to compete with -- gasp! -- a whole lot of lady writers and broadcasters who are making it really hard these days for some of the puir wee old male hacks to continue skating by on cheap and lazy misogynistic jokes.
The line about too many female journalists in Ottawa is my favourite, though. Och, Norman: if you were feeling pathetic and victimized before, just think of what those covens of terrible female journalists in Ottawa must be cooking up for you today.
It would be funny -- well, ok: it is funny, sort of -- if we could believe that Norman Spector wasn't the tip of an iceberg that is still floating along out there. He does us a favour, in a way, in confessing to and modelling the vicious intensity of the backlash against those few women who have managed to achieve a modicum of autonomy and independence and some space for their own voices. He does us another favour, of course, by confirming what we already knew but Peter McKay and his entire party have been trying to deny for a week: the dog metaphor was indeed intended, and it was intentionally sexist.
And of course I agree with Spector on one point: he is pathetic, and so are Peter McKay and Tie Domi.
Back to the coven of plotting (and probably chuckling) female journalists in Ottawa, though -- gosh, what a perfect story for Hallowe'en, yes? Och, Peter and Tie and Norman, lock your doors and hide away tonight. The evil feminists are coming to get you! They're already brewing up their seductive potions:
A dark Cave. In the middle, a Caldron Boiling.[Thunder. Enter the three Witches.]
FIRST WITCH.
Thrice the brindled cat hath mew'd.SECOND WITCH.
Thrice; and once the hedge-pig whin'd.THIRD WITCH.
Harpier cries:--"tis time, 'tis time.FIRST WITCH.
Round about the caldron go;
In the poison'd entrails throw.--
Toad, that under cold stone,
Days and nights has thirty-one
Swelter'd venom sleeping got,
Boil thou first i' the charmed pot!ALL.
Double, double, toil and trouble;
Fire, burn; and caldron, bubble.SECOND WITCH.
Fillet of a fenny snake,
In the caldron boil and bake;
Eye of newt, and toe of frog,
Wool of bat, and tongue of dog,
Adder's fork, and blind-worm's sting,
Lizard's leg, and howlet's wing,--
For a charm of powerful trouble,
Like a hell-broth boil and bubble.ALL.
Double, double, toil and trouble;
Fire, burn; and caldron, bubble.THIRD WITCH.
Scale of dragon, tooth of wolf,
Witch's mummy, maw and gulf
Of the ravin'd salt-sea shark,
Root of hemlock digg'd i' the dark,
Liver of blaspheming Jew,
Gall of goat, and slips of yew
Sliver'd in the moon's eclipse,
Nose of Turk, and Tartar's lips,
Finger of birth-strangl'd babe
Ditch-deliver'd by a drab,--
Make the gruel thick and slab:
Add thereto a tiger's chaudron,
For the ingredients of our caldron.ALL.
Double, double, toil and trouble;
Fire, burn; and caldron, bubble.SECOND WITCH.
Cool it with a baboon's blood,
Then the charm is firm and good.-- Macbeth, IV.i.
Hat tip to Debra at breadnroses.
A couple of months ago I pointed to a story that suggested the major internet service providers were positioning themselves to play Big Brother on law enforcement's behalf in compliance with legislation that hadn't been passed yet. The Liberal government's Modernization of Investigative Techniques Act died on the order paper when the last federal election was called but it was widely believed that Canada's New Law and Order Government™ would revive it.
Michael Geist has an article in the Toronto Star which suggests the government may be holding off on that precisely because they know it's a political hot potato. In fact, it appears the Liberals knew it too.
Internal government documents recently obtained under the Access to Information Act provide some insight into how officials view, and have managed, the initiative. They uncover a clear recognition of the negative public reaction to the proposals, a divide-and-conquer strategy for managing that reaction, and lingering internal doubts about the effectiveness of Canadian privacy legislation to address Internet privacy threats.The negative public reaction is no secret to anyone who has followed the issue through the media. Indeed, a Department of Justice memorandum drafted just after the last federal election acknowledges that "although the public generally responds positively to the idea of `getting tough on crime,' proposals to introduce new investigative tools raise concerns about the surveillance powers of the state and the public's underlying anxiety is heightened by the media and statements of privacy and civil liberties advocates."
The memorandum continues by noting that "almost all stakeholders indicated generally that the lawful access proposals seemed to be moving ahead without the government having provided a convincing justification for the new measures."
The justice department report also sheds light onto how the government has strategically sought to minimize criticism. At least two proposals from 2002 became law in 2004 when they were quietly included in legislation designed to counter insider trading. The report notes that these changes had "low visibility" as few people realized that "lawful access" provisions were being implemented in this fashion.In other words they snuck a couple of things into legislation that was purportedly about something else entirely and hoped no one would notice. And apparently not many did until now. I've known that this was a trick American legislators were fond of, particularly with earmarks, but I wasn't aware our own politicians were practiced at it. I should give my cynicism more free rein.
Moreover, the decision to divide lawful access in two parts — the Modernization of Investigative Techniques Act and a Criminal Code reform package — had the effect of splitting opposition. The government enlisted justice officials to consult with privacy and civil society groups on the criminal code reforms, while the telecom companies worked with public safety officials on the investigative techniques act.The report concludes that the approach reduced the likelihood that privacy and civil society communities would join forces with the telecom industry in opposing "lawful access." Given that "industry also has much more lobbying power than privacy commissioners and civil society . . . [those groups] will need to work harder to influence matters in 2006 than in 2002."
But as I said in that earlier post, it's for our own good. I'm sure Big Brother these officials know what's best even if we don't.
There is no shortage of enemies in right winger world. They are constantly on guard against whatever enemies their "leaders" have identified for them to level their hate at. They need that special someone as a focus for their otherwise inchoate rage. The problem is that sometimes the enemy-of-the-day is far, far away, and just too darn abstract to really serve the purpose of inspiring the right wingers at home.
Well, thanks to Christie Blatchford, we know there is a homegrown enemy, already threatening our heroic troops. And who else would that be but damn dirty leftist peaceniks? In her most recent column decrying the lack of hagiography for our soldiers and the existence of news coverage of anti-war protest marches, Blatchford takes a break from advocating for a return to Victorian-era crime laws to make malevolent accusations toward those who oppose the war.
Well, the boys are back home now, minus their friends and mates killed in action or accident, and not all of the living have their limbs or their eyes, and all are changed. There are many days when they must wonder if somehow, they aren't still in the presence of some enemy even less readily identifiable than the Taliban. [Emphasis mine.]
The fifth column has been identified: anti-war protesters. Blatchford, who has always been a handful of brain cells away from full insanity, finally gives into the inevitable. By labelling those citizens who are against the war the enemy (and don't give me any bullshit about her weasel wording; the accusation is there) she is working to implant in Canada the same vile dichotomy that infects the United States, where any expression of opinion short of slavering adoration of war is labelled "hating America".
There is room in this country for a vast range of opinions, and I personally have no difficulty with those who attend the rallies to "support the troops", or those who advocate for our intervention in Afghanistan. I may or may not agree with these people, but they have a right to air their views, just like the protesters who took to the streets in towns and cities across the country over the weekend to express their disagreement with the war. Labelling these protesters "the enemy" makes as much sense as saying war supporters want our troops dead.
(Backhanded thanks to Mark C. at Defecation Daimnation, who soiled himself with glee at Blatchford's McCarthyesque tactics.)
Ottawa 'satisfied' with U.S. response to Arar case
Ottawa says it is "satisfied" with the American response to Canada's protests over the handling of torture victim Maher Arar, despite the absence of an apology.A letter U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice sent to Canada last week contains no apology to Arar, a Syrian-born Canadian citizen who was deported to Syria, where he was imprisoned and tortured.
Dan Dugas, spokesman for Foreign Affairs Minister Peter MacKay, said yesterday the federal government is happy with the letter's substance.
"We are satisfied with the content of the reply," Dugas told the Globe and Mail.
The letter from Rice says the United States is committed to notifying Ottawa about any Canadian citizen who may be involuntarily sent to a third country.
Ok, then. Make your travel plans accordingly.
Ok, mahigan. Time to put up or ... else. (Drat: I can't be mean to mahigan. Who could?)
Remember your wild rice stuffing recipe? Which you were going to vouchsafe to us? We're none of us getting any younger, y'know.
While we're waiting, I thought I might prod mahigan along a little with my own favourite wild rice recipe. The cookery magazine I took this from sometime in the early 1980s meant it to be a stuffing, so that is how I used it -- the first time. But it is just so tasty that I have made it ever since as a dish on its own, and I wouldn't risk losing any of it in, y'know, some avian cavity. It tastes and smells of autumn and early winter, rich, smoky, nutty, crunchy.
Wild Rice and Hazelnut Stuffing
1/2 cup butter
1 cup coarsely chopped hazelnuts (pine nuts work well too)
3 cups sliced mushrooms (actually, I quarter mine if they're just buttons -- the slices get too limp)
1 cup finely chopped onions
1 1/2 cups wild rice (about 8 oz / 250 grams)
3 cups chicken stock
2 tsp chopped fresh chervil (or parsley), or 1 tsp dried
salt (not much, eh? I'm sort of off salt lately)
1 tsp chopped fresh thyme or 1/2 tsp dried
pepper (not much, but yay pepper)
bay leaf / leaves
strip of lemon rind (and/or maybe a dash of lemon juice -- an improvement on salt)
In large saucepan, melt butter over medium heat. Add hazelnuts and sauté for 3 to 5 minutes or until golden; remove with slotted spoon. Reserve.
Add mushrooms and onions to pan, and sauté until tender, 5 to 8 minutes, stirring frequently. Stir in rice, coating all grains with butter. Add stock, chervil, salt, thyme, pepper, bay leaf, and lemon rind. Cover and bring to boil. Reduce heat to low and simmer until rice is almost tender, about 45 minutes. Uncover and continue cooking for 10 minutes or until rice is tender and stock is absorbed. Adjust seasoning to taste. Cool slightly and mix in nuts.
You may find that the stock is still not fully absorbed in that time. If so, ignore it. If you keep trying to steam it off, your wild rice will become mushy and splayed. That may be ok tomorrow, when you're eating the leftovers, but you deserve a first-night's feast on the little grains just as they are peaking.
Wild rice can be a bit cranky, in my experience. As I understand it, wild rice is not actually rice but a grass seed, and sometimes you will get batches that just don't want to cook. I don't know why that happens, but I'll bet that mahigan does.
Three weeks ago Stephen Harper got a lot of press for saying that he wanted to see the American government "come clean" on its role in the detention and imprisonment of Maher Arar.
Canada wants to hear that "these kinds of incidents will not be repeated in the future."
The U.S. government is not apologizing for its treatment of Maher Arar, CTV News reported Friday.The network quoted a letter from American Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to Foreign Affairs Minister Peter MacKay, which makes no mention of an apology.
The letter also doesn't mention removing Arar from the U.S. watch list.
...
Rice's letter to MacKay notes that the United States agrees fully with the consular understanding with Canada to notify and consult each other in such cases, but there is no apology for Arar's treatment.
To all those who thought that the efforts by Canada's New Government™ to "repair" our relationship with the Bush administration would have any real results: have you learned nothing from Tony Blair?
As skdadl hinted at last week in comments, there's been a theme to this month's posts: I've been purposely selecting female artists. (Would someone at YouTube please find some Sue Foley? And a Koko Taylor rendition of Wang Dang Doodle would be nice.) I'm going to close out the month with a couple of pieces that push the definition a little as well as crossing generations.
First we have Etta James having some fun with the R & B classic I'd Rather Go Blind (Blind Girl).
And then we have blues-rocker Ana Popovic with My Man.
If there's a religion in the world today I hate, it isn't Islam, it isn't Christianity, even the noxious right wing version in the US - it's free trade fundamentalism.
That Free Trade fundamentalism is on show in Canada with the Conservative government's attempt to destroy the Canadian Wheat Board. They certainly don't call it that - they talk about "choice" but if the lowest cost farmers (mostly large corporate farms) and those with the lowest transportation costs (ie. southern farmers near the US border) are able to bypass the Board, ending its "one desk" selling authority then the Wheat Board is effectively done.
The Wheat Board has been challenged in front of both NAFTA and the WTO - it is legal under international law. Agricultural economists have estimated that by controlling 20% of the global grain market, it brings in about 800 million to prairie communities which would not receive that money without it.
And if it dies, a part of the Prairies will die. It will destroy most of what is left of the smaller farms. They willl be bought up, one by one, until the vast majority are part of huge corporate operations, the majority of the benefits of which will not flow to local communities. Why? Because with all the low cost producers out of the pool, the wheat board's wheat will be uncompetitive - the only solution will be to join private large producers with low cost structures. As farm families leave, and as less and less workers are needed, many town will turn into ghost towns.
There's a simple answer to all this, Section 47.1 of the Canadian Wheat Board Act explicitly requires a referendum with the growers before the act can be modified. Chuck Strahl is set to just ignore that.
If Chuck and the Conservatives are so sure that farmers support their changes, why not have the referendum? If they don't think they can win it, why are they making changes that most farmers oppose, because they know that most of them will lose, and the big winners will be transnational agricultural companies?
Oh wait... I think I just answered my own question. Perhaps it has something to do with the fact that the Conservatives serve those interests and not those of rural Canadians. We saw that with the Timber deal, which would have (and will) completely whipe entire communites from the map when the mills that are their primary reason for existence close.
If you're Canadian and you think ending the single desk authority of the Wheat Board is a bad idea, I'd like to ask you to call or write your MP, Chuck Strahl, Stephen Harper, or the leaders of the opposition parties. This act wll change the nature of Canada more than anything else the Conservatives have proposed, and not in any sort of way that will benefit most Canadians, most prairie communites... or most farmers.
You can find your MP's contact information here:
Arar lawyers exploring whether Boeing connection exists
Maria LaHood, a New York-based lawyer involved with Arar’s lawsuit against the U.S. government, said the legal team may hire a private investigator to find out whether Boeing’s Jeppesen International Trip Planning played a role in flying Arar to Syria. “We don’t expect them to come forward, but we’re looking into what role (Jeppesen) may have played,” LaHood said in an interview.A report in The New Yorker this week alleged that San Jose-based Jeppesen helped handle flight plans, hotel reservations and other navigational details for the secret flights.
...
The New Yorker quoted an unnamed former Jeppesen employee saying that Bob Overby, Jeppesen’s managing director, said at an internal meeting that “we do all of the extraordinary rendition flights — you know, the torture flights. Let’s face it, some of these flights end up that way.”A Jeppesen spokesperson declined to comment to The New Yorker.
It’s unclear what legal exposure Boeing might face if it’s proven to have ties to Arar’s case.
A website called CorpWatch has picked up the original New Yorker article which reveals that Jeppesen may be tied in to another rendition and Boeing may yet face legal action on that front.
James Travers expands upon a point that I have made many times in the past: Stephen Harper is planning to run the U.S. Republican playbook when the next election rolls around. There is no attempt made to even alter the model, which usually runs like this:
- Give crappy legislation a positive name, then curse out your opponents for opposing it.
- Use fear to mobilize your base and intimidate the opposition.
- Use the military to boost your patriotic bona fides (at no risk to yourself), while simultaneously labelling your cirtics anti-military.
- Surround the prime minister (or president) in a bubble of sycophancy to prevent actual facts from seeping into a decision making process entirely ruled by ideology.
Here's Travers identifying this tendency, and he really is at the top of his form:
Week by week, evidence mounts that Stephen Harper is creating, packaging and marketing an alternative universe.How else to explain a Clean Air Act that experts all but unanimously agree will only make this country a dirtier part of a dirtier world? Let's be perfectly clear: Talk of meaningful progress by 2050 is pure delusional fantasy for politicians with four-years-or-less lifecycles and gnat-like attention spans.
On the strength of this week's pronouncement, the only environmental change between now and never-never will be political. Armed with legislation that sounds socks-and-sandals green, a blue-suit party can now stump cross-country in an expected spring election accusing their opponents of being against clean air.
As a tactic, it owes plenty to U.S. presidential contests. Candidates there scavenge voting records to savage each other for not supporting legislation with feel-good titles hiding hideous flaws.
It's also not new for a government that relentlessly labels itself "new." Ideology and populism emerged as the prevailing currents early in this minority and are only gaining strength as the Conservative grip on power weakens.
Wilfully blind to bureaucratic policy options and isolated from all but a few cabinet ministers and advisers, Harper's guidance comes from his own unshakeable certainty. Causes are disconnected from effects and facts are no match for beliefs.
This alternate universe is one in which neoconservative principles are not complete failures, militarism is the cure all for world strife, and reality is a malleable tool to be shaped towards entirely political ends. Every trick in the book is pulled out to mask the empitness of Conservative non-solutions to non-problems.
Harper and his minister of pollution, Rona Ambrose, now risk being seen as national health hazards. While the oil and auto industries breathe easily, the majority of voters who live in five big cities will not and that's no way for Conservatives to cling to power let alone morph from minority to majority.Harper isn't giving up on that project and is using fear on issues more immediate than the environment to sculpt public opinion in more pleasing ways. From community crime to the threat of terrorism, the Prime Minister is positioning Conservatives as the party with the tough-as-boots, common-sense responses to scary problems that hurt our heads.
Except his government's solutions wither under scrutiny. A quick glance south is all that's needed to learn that three-strikes laws are better at filling prisons with the systemically poor as well as the mentally ill than making streets safe. A slightly longer look east to Iraq and Afghanistan is all that's required to understand foreign boots on Islamic soil only metastasizes terrorism.
Conservatives don't let those doubts intrude into their make-believe. Adult punishment is a faster, more satisfying crime fix than long-haul early childhood education, fighting poverty or stabilizing families. Questioning the wisdom of the Kandahar mission — let alone its changing purpose or dwindling chances of success — is unpatriotic and a low blow to troop morale.
Those arguments are bogus. They crank the clock back to a father-knows-best time when paternal decisions were self-evidently sound and safely beyond question.
to the south, Americans seem to be lumbering out of their 9/11-induce torpor and reeling with disbelief at the wreckage that had been made of their country at the hands of neoconservative buffoons and corporate lackeys. Even if the Democrats win the House or the Senate this November, the clean-up after the Bush disaster will take decades.
Harper has not yet had the time to do the same amount of damage to Canada, but he's got the job well underway. Let's hope Canadians are savvy enough to recognize the danger of travelling George Bush's path with our very own Little Republican to lead us, lemming-like, over the cliff.
When Michael Ignatieff first entered Canadian politics and I first dared to criticize him, I was carefully but firmly cautioned that I needed to read him more carefully. When I based my criticisms on his actual words, I was further admonished because I hadn't read quite enough of him. For a while, I followed the links I was provided and read the material that was offered. And in the end I came to the conclusion that Ignatieff's greatest gift was an ability to endlessly repeat himself without ever saying exactly the same thing twice. If it were anyone else I would have called it obfuscation but apparently Ignatieff's academic credentials were enough to make it something quite different: an ability to deal in nuance and complexity that surpasses the rest of us mere mortals.
Lately Paul Wells has been spending a fair amount of time on Iggie and I have to admit I'm enjoying it. In yesterday's edition Wells dealt at length with Ignatieff's pronouncements on Quebec, nationhood and the various reactions to them but tucked at the bottom of the post is this:
Turning to the Globe, we see Raymonde Folco, an MP who wavered in her support for Ignatieff after he called Qana a war crime. "But after speaking to him at length, she said she believes that Mr. Ignatieff did not say what he really meant."Precisely. A stout refusal to believe what Michael Ignatieff says has become the central condition for supporting his candidacy for the leadership of the Liberal Party of Canada. The opposition to Ignatieff now comes exclusively from people who fear his words have meaning.
When I use a word it means just what I choose it to mean, neither more nor less.' .
Thomas Walkom follows up on yesterday's ruling that the definition of terrorism in our anti-terrorism legislation is unconstitutional (blogged here).
Under the 2001 law, a terrorist activity is defined as an act of violent intimidation that is motivated by religion, politics or ideology. Yet, as Rutherford noted, the government has never been able to satisfactorily explain why mass murder carried out in the name of religion or ideology is somehow worse than mass murder carried out for reasons of profit or personal pathology.At the time the law was passed, the then-Liberal government's only defence for this motive provision was that, without it, terrorist crimes would be no different from ordinary crimes.
Which, as Rutherford said, is precisely the point.
"The average person would be hard-pressed, I daresay, to recount much about the motives of some if not all of these notorious crimes (such as the 9/11 attacks)," he wrote. "Just what political, religious or ideological objectives or causes the perpetrators felt they were supporting with their actions is largely lost on the populations affected. And for good reason. It doesn't really matter."
What's more, he wrote, the decision to focus on religious or ideological motive will inevitably lead to a chilling effect on the right of Canadians to think and believe what they wish.
Those who are not terrorists, he writes, will inevitably be tarred because they happen to have the same religion or beliefs as those who are.
From the other side, Conservative Justice Minister Vic Toews has said he wouldn't be averse to eliminating motive from the definition of terrorism since that might make it easier to convict suspects.
I'm not sure I follow Toews' reasoning here. It seems to me that if the motive provision is stripped away, then the evidence of a crime or a conspiracy has to rise to the same standard it always did. Whether that makes it easier or more difficult to convict will depend on the specific case.
But meanwhile the War on Terror™ marketing campaign -- the fiction that we can declare war on a noun and that Al Qaeda presents us with an existential threat more potent than the Cold War -- is further undermined. As Walkom writes:
In effect, yesterday's court decision reminds us of this. It says a crime is a crime is a crime.
Works for me.
"Canada can take care of North Korea. They're not busy."
That, as truthdig tells us, is how the Republican National Committee hopes to win a senatorial race in Tennessee.
Well, they have some other tricks up their sleeves, too. The attack ad in question has outraged many Americans -- including not only the Democrat candidate who is its target but also the Republican candidate it is supposed to support -- for its subliminal racism:
L.A. Times:WASHINGTON—A new Republican Party television ad featuring a scantily clad white woman winking and inviting a black candidate to “call me” is drawing charges of race-baiting, with critics saying it contradicts a landmark GOP statement last year that the party was wrong in past decades to use racial appeals to win support from white voters.
Critics said the ad, which is funded by the Republican National Committee and has aired since Friday, plays on fears of interracial relationships to scare some white voters in rural Tennessee to oppose Democratic Rep. Harold E. Ford Jr. Ford is locked in a tight race, hoping to become the first African American senator since Reconstruction to represent a state in the former Confederacy.
“It is a powerful innuendo that plays to pre-existing prejudices about African American men and white women,” said Hilary Shelton, head of the Washington office of the National Assn. for the Advancement of Colored People, the country’s oldest civil rights organization.
A former Republican senator, William S. Cohen of Maine, was more blunt. Cohen, who was also Defense secretary under President Clinton, said on CNN that the ad was “a very serious appeal to a racist sentiment.”
It's always hard to tell from this distance what it would take to be able to say that Karl Rove just shot himself in the foot, but maybe he just winged one of the Bush administration's most sycophantic faithful allies?
CanWest reports:
WASHINGTON - A Republican attack ad stirring controversy in the U.S. mid-term elections does a drive-by smear on Canada, suggesting America's northern neighbour is a do-nothing country on world affairs....
Produced by the Republican National Committee, the ''man on the street'' ad features a hefty man wearing suspenders and a ball cap, commenting sarcastically on his view of Democratic foreign policy.
''Let Canada take care of North Korea. They're not busy,'' the man says.
...
Just how Canada got caught up in the mid-term mudslinging remains a mystery. The Republican National Committee did not respond to calls from CanWest News Service.
But the ad fosters stereotypes about Canada's engagement in international affairs that Prime Minister Stephen Harper has tried hard to dispel.
Earlier this year, the Canadian Embassy in Washington mounted an advertising campaign highlighting Canada's role as America's ally in Afghanistan, where 43 Canadians have died since 2002.
David Wilkins, the U.S. ambassador to Canada, voiced outrage in the last federal election campaign when the Liberal party criticized President George W. Bush.
Perhaps Ambassador Wilkins is familiar with the numbers in this report from the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives (CCPA)?
After the United States, Canada has sustained the highest number of military deaths as a result of hostile actions in Afghanistan since the original invasion in 2001 (27 of 244).Since February 2006, when our troops began operations in Kandahar, Canada has sustained 43% of all military deaths among U.S. allies in the coalition (20 of 47 non-U.S. deaths).
When adjusted for the relative size of troop commitments, a Canadian soldier in Kandahar is nearly three times more likely to be killed in hostile action than a British soldier, and four-and-a-half times more likely than an American soldier in Afghanistan.
A Canadian soldier in Kandahar is still nearly six times more likely to die in hostilities than a U.S. soldier serving in Iraq.
(See also the updated casualty figures at this CBC site.)
Or perhaps it doesn't matter what Ambassador Wilkins is aware of. It seems unlikely that the sniggering overgrown smart-mouthed frat boys in Washington who concoct attack ads for the Republican National Committee give a damn about what is happening to Canadian soldiers (they don't seem all that concerned about what is happening to their own), or even what could happen in a Canadian election to a prime minister or a political party perceived by the Canadian people to be bowing and scraping before vulgarians who mock us even as they exploit us.
What matters is that the Canadian people know those numbers and then listen to the signals coming from the puppet-masters in Washington. Stephen Harper and Peter MacKay and Gordon O'Connor and Rick Hillier -- they are laughing at you; they are using you and sneering at you as they do it. And because of you, they are ridiculing all of us and defiling the sacrifice of every Canadian in uniform.
Saturday, 28 October 2006: Across Canada, let's march.
Hat-tip to Américain Égalitaire at breadnroses.ca.
While a parliamentary committee reviews the anti-terrorism measures that are due to sunset in a couple of months as I noted in the post below this one, an Ontario Superior Court judge just gave that committee something else to think about.
The first person charged under the federal Anti-terrorism Act in Canada won a legal victory on Tuesday when an Ontario judge struck down a provision because he says it violates charter rights.Justice Douglas Rutherford of Ontario Superior Court ruled that a section of the Anti-terrorism Act that defines "terrorism" violates the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.
So how silly does it have to get before we acknowledge that the post 9/11 anti-terrorism legislation was poorly thought out and passed in too much of a hurry and we need to back up and rethink this mess?
When the omnibus anti-terror legislation was passed by the Liberal government in December, 2001 the Libs bowed to public pressure and attached sunset provisions to some of the measures that were enacted. Two of those measures are due to expire in December of this year unless parliament votes to extend them. In a pair of articles, the Toronto Star reports that parliament appears likely to do just that.
Tonda MacCharles reports the news.
The lifespan of the most controversial anti-terrorism powers granted to police after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks should be extended to 2011 to safeguard national security, a parliamentary committee recommends.The measures — preventive arrest and investigative hearings for material witnesses in terror cases — should be reviewed again once the country has had a decade of experience with them, the public safety committee said yesterday. Neither power has yet been used.
Both MacCharles' article and Thomas Walkom's commentary focus especially on preventive arrest and on the dissenting views of the committee's minority report. Needless to say, I'm with them. Walkom writes:
In a minority dissent, New Democrat MP Joe Comartin and Bloc Québécois MP Serge Ménard argue that preventive detention too should be scrapped. They make a compelling case that it is not even necessary.Police already have the power to arrest someone they believe is about to commit crimes. But they can only do so if their belief is reasonable — that is, if they have some evidence.
In such cases, the suspect is charged (usually with conspiracy), held over for trial and either convicted or acquitted.
The preventive detention law, on the other hand, provides no definitive conclusion.
"It may be used to brand someone a terrorist on grounds of proof that are not sufficient to condemn him, but against which he will never be able to fully defend himself," the minority report points out.
A person tarred by preventive detention may be prevented from flying or travelling abroad. He may lose his job.
And yet, as with Maher Arar, there may be no real proof that he was involved in anything illegal.
In his report on the Arar case Justice O'Connor reminded us repeatedly of the danger that was created by the mere fact of describing Arar as an Islamic extremist because, as he said, labels have a way of sticking. The minority report here makes the same point: that once someone gets stuck with the label of "terrorist" it can be damn difficult to peel that label off. It seems that neither the Liberals nor the Conservatives have really been paying attention.
As the old song says, they've got an awful lot of coffee in Brazil. They've also got lots of natural gas in Bolivia as well as a socialist president in Evo Morales, who has promised to nationalize the industry. They used to have rather too many old Nazis and Nazi sympathizers in Paraguay, and they still have enormous reserves of underground water in the north of that country, right where Paraguay, Bolivia, and Brazil meet.
A very curious story has been bubbling up in the Latin American press and a few blogs over the last couple of weeks. Today for the first time the Guardian is reporting it cautiously as a set of rumours first floated by the state-controlled Cuban news agency Prensa Latina. Is George W. Bush -- or his dad, or his daughter, depending on which source you read -- buying / already the owner of a hundred-thousand-acre ranch in northern Paraguay?
Some have speculated that he might be trying to wrestle control of the Guarani Aquifer, one of the largest underground water reserves, from the Paraguayans.Rumours of Mr Bush's supposed forays into South American real estate surfaced during a recent 10-day visit to the country by his daughter Jenna Bush. Little is known about her trip to Paraguay, although officially she travelled with the UN children's agency Unicef to visit social projects. Photographers from the Paraguayan newspaper ABC Color tracked her down to one restaurant in Paraguay's capital Asunción, where she was seen flanked by 10 security guards, and was also reported to have met Paraguay's president, Nicanor Duarte, and the US ambassador to Paraguay, James Cason. Reports in sections of the Paraguayan media suggested she was sent on a family "mission" to tie up the land purchase in the "chaco".
...
Last week the Paraguayan news group Neike suggested that Ms Bush was in Paraguay to "visit the land acquired by her father - relatively close to the Brazilian Pantanal [wetlands] and the Bolivian gas reserves".
Gosh, I hear you exclaim. I haven't thought twice about Paraguay since Alfredo Stroessner, host and protector of Josef Mengele and other notable fascists, enthusiastic participant in Operation Condor, was deposed in 1989.
I hadn't either until this story began to surface. It hadn't occurred to me to wonder whether Paraguay still had any particular ties to the U.S. or whether those would signify much anyway. Then I read a curious paragraph in the Wikipedia entry on Paraguay, a section titled "U.S. Military Controversy." Well: I read that paragraph last week. It was there last week. It isn't there any more.
Here it is, from the Google cache (google Wurmser Paraguay):
U.S. Military ControversyIn 2006, a classified memo was leaked that revealed the United States has interest in an air base in Mariscal Estigarribia, Paraguay. This memo, authored by David Wurmser and Michael Maloof, [1] notes that both Wurmser, and Maloof had met the American neo-conservatives to discuss a plan to attack "terrorists" in the natural reserve rich South American region. About 500 US troops landed in at the air base in Mariscal Estigarribia, Paraguay in July 2005, after Paragua's senate voted to authorize immunity from the International Criminal Court. American occupation of this base would put the Bolivian gas fields at center stage of the region.
Gosh. Now, why do you think that paragraph would have disappeared this week? The Guardian also notes the arrival of the Marines last year, although its report fails to mention that curious vote in the Paraguayan senate, authorizing U.S. troops' immunity from the ICC:
The US presence in Paraguay has been under scrutiny since May 2005 when the country's Congress agreed to allow 400 American marines to operate there for 18 months in exchange for financial aid.At the time many viewed the arrival of troops as a sign that Washington was trying to monitor US business interests in neighbouring Bolivia, after the election of Evo Morales, a leftwing leader who promised to nationalise his country's natural gas industry.
Hmmn. So what are we to think, do you think? Me, I don't like to think of self as a tin-foil hatter, but this is curious, yes?
For me, the news that Jenna Bush had become a UNICEF ambassador was already a disconnect of baroque proportions, and Jenna as any kind of secret political emissary seems to me to lift this story right off into the rococo. But then, as Scott Fitzgerald once said, the rich aren't like us, so what would I know?
None of my old links to the translation of the original Prensa Latina story is working any more, but you can read a summary of the first rumours at Political Cortex.
So what is going on? The Bushes are looking for a retirement home? Preparing a counter-terrorism base in South America? Or a base for "pre-emptive" action against uppity socialists like Morales? Thinking natural gas? Water? Forced eradication of Bolivia's coca crops, an American demand that Morales is also defying? Immunity for American troops? For American politicians on the run?
Gee. In Paraguay, it seems, it's just like the bad old days. Maybe.
Hat tip to Toedancer, Faith, and Debra at breadnroses.ca.
A few days ago, Scott Tribe of progbloggers warned some of us that a certain group of bloggers who shall remain nameless were trying to start a blogburst by vilifying the Court Challenges program. Given that the Court Challenges program had already been pretty much killed dead by that group's favourite Vulcan prime minister, there seemed to some of us a touch of morbid obsession in that project.
So we thought of a more cheerful alternative: the progressive poetry blogburst tribute to the Court Challenges program. If you believe in democracy, clap hands and then write a pome in tribute to the Court Challenges program, for which I will provide a bit of history later. Well: I will provide a bit of the history of Stephen Harper's personal animus against the program.
But first, here are the rules:
1. Your pome does not have to be good, and it doesn't have to be long. Four lines minimum and heartfelt -- that is all we ask.Update to rules: Haikus are welcome. Even couplets are welcome. Forget the four-line rule.
2. Your pome must mention the Court Challenges program. It may also mention the destruction by fiat of the mandate of Status of Women Canada and/or the Canadian Wheat Board, or any other recent outrage you can think of.
3. You don't have to be tagged or to tag anyone else. Just, y'know, compose and publish.
I have a modest example here. I am not m'self much of a poet, which is why I don't call my pome a poem. It is a bit of doggerel, a parody of a great sonnet (which I shall copy on the flip), but we also serve who only stand and applaud the real poets, eh? And I am suspecting that out there in progblog land there are in fact a few real poets who could help us to sing enlightened programs like the CCP back to life.
Ahem. *cough*
Ode to the Court Challenges Program
When I have fears that Stephen Harper’s crew
May slip and slide through their minority,
May hide their worst intentions too
In hopes of a majority;When I behold the mandates cut and mocked
Of those who Challenge prejudice and fear,
Whose visions of women’s future really rocked
Or spoke to rural history we hold dear;Then I remember still to turn my gaze,
To listen for the voices fighting back,
To citizens who bravely spend their days
Defending rights and freedoms we still lack.The women, farmers, activists, progbloggers --
And with this pome I now tag all the poggers.
So why did Stephen Harper really hate the Court Challenges program so much?
Harper v. Canada, 18 May 2004.
On behalf of the National Citizens' Coalition (not quite just plain folks, eh?), Harper had challenged limits on the election-advertising spending of individuals (ie: the very wealthy, especially wealthy corporations), up to the Supreme Court. He lost. Who knows whether the court would have ruled against him anyway (probably -- our justices so far tend to be democrats)? But look at the list of interveners in that case. Guess how Democracy Watch and the National Anti-Poverty Organization were able to speak to that case before the Supreme Court?
Our Stephen does not forget a slight. Our Stephen is a man who intends to get even. Our Stephen nurses a grudge. The Court Challenges program crossed our Stephen, and it was from that moment on dead meat if our Stephen ever became prime minister.
Harper v. Canada. Has a real ring to it, doesn't it?
April Reign has already started the progressive poetry blogburst off for us, and I must let Scott know soon that we have conscripted him into another campaign, even as he celebrates today the one-hundredth post to the "five things" meme that he has shepherded so well through Women's History Month.
And my deepest apologies to the lovely man who wrote this:
When I have Fears that I may cease to be
When I have fears that I may cease to beBefore my pen has glean'd my teeming brain,
Before high-piled books, in charactery,
Hold like rich garners the full ripen'd grain;
When I behold, upon the night's starr'd face,
Huge cloudy symbols of a high romance,
And think that I may never live to trace
Their shadows, with the magic hand of chance;
And when I feel, fair creature of an hour,
That I shall never look upon thee more,
Never have relish in the faery power
Of unreflecting love;--then on the shore
Of the wide world I stand alone, and think
Till love and fame to nothingness do sink.
-- John Keats, 1818
It's funny how progressive bloggers can work for several weeks in support of feminism in general and the Status of Women in Canada in particular and there isn't a peep out of the top-down media. But let a few Blogging Tories leap to the defence of Peter MacKay after he makes insulting comments in the House of Commons and it gets immediate attention.
It must be more of that liberal bias I've heard so much about.
I've seen it suggested more than once that Peter MacKay is playing Gordon Brown to Stephen Harper's Tony Blair, waiting patiently while Steve has his time on the throne in the sun and assuming that when Harper's time is up, his will begin. If that's really the case, Peter ought to work on that looking prime ministerial thing.
It's bad enough that he's clinging to obsolete talking points on Afghanistan. At least he can comfort himself with the fact that the boss is too. But when he also manages to call a female MP a dog in the House of Commons, thereby giving credibility to the accusations that the Cons really don't respect women, and then gets caught napping in Question Period with hysterical results, I don't think it helps any leadership aspirations he may have.
Thing is, given the kind of week the Conservatives have had the next leadership contest may come around sooner than anyone thought -- as I've said before on this blog, we live in hope -- and at the moment, bench strength doesn't appear to be something the CPC has in abundance.
I haven't bothered with all the stories of Republican scandals in months. I know they're a bunch of crooks and hypocrites and if you read this blog, chances are you do too. But this one is just so... perfect. As reported at TPMmuckraker, the House Appropriations committee has had so much to investigate in recent months that they'd hired 60 extra investigators as contract staff. Committee chairman Jerry Lewis, himself under investigation (and having spent eight hundred grand on his own legal fees so far) just fired them all.
The TPMm post quotes from the Congressional Quarterly (which requires a subscription).
Lewis’ decision “has in fact stalled all of the investigations on the staff,” said one of the contractors, a former FBI agent, who asked not to be identified. “This eviscerates the investigatory function. There is little if any ability to do any oversight now.”
...
“This staff has saved billions and billions of dollars, we’ve turned up malfeasance and misfeasance,” the contractor said. “It’s results justify the expense of the staff. I have no idea why the chairman would do this.”
Secrets law ruled unconstitutional; judge quashes warrants
An Ontario court has struck down sections of Canada's secrecy law in throwing out RCMP warrants used to search a reporter's home.David Paciocco, a lawyer for Ottawa Citizen reporter Juliet O'Neill, says Thursday's ruling by the Ontario Superior Court is a tremendous affirmation of press freedom.
Squads of Mounties combed through O'Neill's home and office on a cold January morning in 2004 in an attempt to find the source of information about the Maher Arar affair.
On the other hand, I can't say I'm sorry to see this act challenged. As the CBC notes it was part of the omnibus anti-terror legislation that was passed in a panic following 9/11 and much of that legislation was ill-considered, though some of our legislators seem unwilling to let go of some its provisions.
A Commons panel that has been reviewing the Anti-Terrorism Act plans to recommend the extension for five years of two controversial provisions that give Canadian authorities broad powers in detaining terror suspects and questioning witnesses, Canwest News Service has learned.The federal act, passed in 2001 in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks, added two provisions to the Criminal Code. One enables the police to arrest suspects without warrant if authorities have reason to believe a terrorist act will be committed; the other allows judges to compel individuals to testify at ''investigative hearings.'' Both provisions were due to expire early in the new year.
But Conservative MP Gord Brown, who chairs the Commons subcommittee that has been reviewing the act, said Tuesday he will table an interim report in Parliament as early as Friday that will recommend extending the clauses.
The complete works of Charles Darwin are now online.
From the Reuters report:
Among the unique collection is the notebook used during the Beagle voyage which would later forge his scientific arguments. It was stolen in the 1980s, but Darwin's great-great-grandson hopes the publication online, thanks to a transcription from a microfilm copy made two decades earlier, will persuade whoever has it to return it."It has huge importance for the history of science," Randal Keynes told the BBC.
"We very much hope that now that it is known to have been stolen and the pictures of it are on the Web site and can be seen by everyone and read, when it next surfaces someone will get in touch with English Heritage, the owners, and enable them to recover it and bring it back to Darwin's home, where it should be."
Other items in the free collection of 50,000 pages and 40,000 images are the first editions of the Journal of Researchers, written in 1839, The Descent of Man, The Zoology of the Voyage of HMS Beagle, which includes his observations during his five-year trip to the Amazon, Patagonia and the Pacific, and the first five editions of the Origin of Species.
John van Wyhe, director of the project run by Cambridge University, said the collection is so comprehensive it will help dispel the "many misconceptions and myths" about the naturalist.
Think of all the people who are going to be bouncing up and down at this news over breakfast this morning. George W. Bush. Pat Buchanan. Lorna Dueck. Charles McVety, if he isn't still too busy scheming with the PMO about how to sink Garth Turner.
And then there are all those lovely people over at the Discovery Institute, who brought you the theory of Intelligent Design.
And me too, of course. I love reading other people's diaries.
MPs back bill to revive Kelowna deal
Former prime minister Paul Martin won approval in principle Wednesday for a private member's bill aimed at resurrecting his cherished Kelowna accord.Martin's bill, which would compel the Harper government to implement the $5.1- billion aboriginal pact, passed 159-123 with the support of Liberal, New Democrat and Bloc Quebecois MPs.
...
Martin's bill will now be referred to the all-party aboriginal affairs committee for study before returning to the Commons for a final vote.Although the Tories could try to delay the bill, they don't have the numbers to stall it indefinitely or defeat it in the face of unanimous opposition support. Nor could they stop it in the Senate, where Liberals hold the majority of seats.
The combined majority opposition in the House of Commons is demanding emergency hearings on the future of the Canadian Wheat Board.Agriculture critics from the Liberals, NDP and Bloc Quebecois say the minority Conservative government is moving to cripple the wheat board with actions that are "unprecedented, unethical and undemocratic."
They want the Commons agriculture committee to hold emergency hearings next week to hear from wheat board advocates who they say are being muzzled by the government.
Hat tip to Scott Tribe at ProgBloggers for the first story.
Yesterday President Bush signed the Military Commissions Act into law. If you're contemplating visiting the U.S.A. please be advised that while on American soil you remain free at the pleasure of the President.
When charges surfaced last month that the names of those filing Access to Information requests were being illegally leaked to politicians, a parliamentary committee voted to investigate the matter. In testimony before that committee yesterday Ken Rubin, whose name frequently turns up with regard to this subject, charged that the government has been "profiling" people like him.
Federal government departments are profiling some access requesters, a veteran Ottawa researcher charged Monday.Testifying before a parliamentary committee, Ken Rubin revealed that he learned recently he has been the subject of just such a profile.
Documents Rubin obtained from the Canadian Border Services Agency revealed a memo prepared in January 2004 for then-public safety minister Anne McLellan outlining an access request that Rubin had filed for information concerning the department's Advance Passenger Information project. In the memo, which the department told Rubin was never transmitted all the way to the minister, the department outlines details of telephone calls officials had with Rubin, other access requests he had filed and the fact that he had volunteered to help Maher Arar and his wife get information about their case.
Jason Kenney, parliamentary secretary to Prime Minister Stephen Harper, said Rubin's testimony about being profiled corresponds with some of the testimony that the committee has already heard about the way the privacy of some access requesters has been treated in the past.''This would be, I guess, the third concrete instance that we know about. There seems to be sufficient evidence to conclude that this practice of furnishing names to political staff has happened in the past. Just how widespread or how frequent, we just don't know.''
Retired Col. Michel Drapeau, a lawyer who has written a text on the access law, said he believes names of requesters of sensitive information have been known by political ministers "since the very beginning," when the act came into force in 1983.
Literary awards don't often bring tears to my eyes. The publishing biz is a business first of all, and if anything it has become more narrowly that in the almost forty years that I have watched it and worked in it. Literary prizes are as much the creatures of trends and fads and commerce and politics as are any other awards. Of course the winners are always at least "good" writers, by one or another standard of the times, but then so are all the losers, not to mention many of the unnominated and even some of the unpublished. Sometimes but not always, the prize of prizes, the Nobel, finally catches up to a writer who changed the course of literature some years before, as it did last year (Harold Pinter) or in 2003, when a still-great master, J.M. Coetzee, joined the Nobel laureates.
But every once in a while literary accomplishment feels momentous because it is recognized at a moment when it just might matter. In her appreciation of this year's laureate, Turkish novelist and essayist Orhan Pamuk, Margaret Atwood writes:
It would be difficult to conceive of a more perfect winner for our catastrophic times. Just as Turkey stands at the crossroads of the Muslim East/Middle East and the European and North American west, so Pamuk's work inhabits the shifting ground of an increasingly dangerous cultural and religious overlap, where ideologies as well as personalities collide.
Like Atwood, both the members of the Swedish Academy and the writer who knows Pamuk's writing most intimately, his translator Maureen Freely, have challenged the reductive view that the Academy's choice this year was a mere political gesture:
The Nobel has gone not to the man and not to his politics but to his words, his characters, and his ideas. Born into a culture that had (recently) clipped its eastern roots, and that was struggling to define itself as western, he has (like all of us who grew up in Istanbul) grappled with double identities all his life. What might have seemed a curse to a young man is the source from which his imagination feeds. He has taken both sides of his clashing heritage and made them whole. Though he is often praised in the west for making Turkey "visible", his greater achievement is to make the west see what it looks like from the outside. This is why he has such devoted readerships on both sides of the divide.
Inevitably, however, the narrowly interested on many sides remain determined to reduce Pamuk's luminous works to the merely political.
At home in Turkey, and most predictably, the reductionists are the same radical nationalists who have hauled Pamuk and dozens of other Turkish writers and journalists (including the novelist Elif Shafak, days before she was due to give birth) who have written or spoken about the Armenian genocide of 1915-17 into court to answer charges of "belitttling" or "insulting" "Turkishness," a crime under the infamous article 301 of the Turkish penal code.
To those of us who have been gagging on Western propaganda about the "war on terror" and the "clash of civilizations," the attacks on Pamuk and his peers are a curiosity, for among traditionally Islamic cultures, Turkey is an anomaly. Freedom of expression in Turkey is more immediately threatened by radical secular nationalism than it is by religious fundamentalism. The current prime minister, although the leader of a conservative Islamic party, seems determined to take Turkey into the EU. To Western eyes and compared to the angry if still-powerful heirs of Ataturk's secular revolution, Recep Erdoğan appears, for the moment, the greater modernizer.
The usual suspects are in play as well in Turkey, though, given its strategic location: Islamist radicals, Kurdish nationalists, and meddlesome Americans. Turkey has lately dared the U.S. to control Kurdish activists taking refuge in Iraqi Kurdistan; meanwhile, along that shared border, Iran considers its (not bad) options.
Of this immensely complicated world -- in whose complications Westerners are more deeply implicated than most of us know and almost any want to admit -- Orhan Pamuk writes. If he were merely a political writer, he would be parti pris by now, would have leapt to a side, one of the many in play, would be writing mere arguments. Instead, as his readers know and as the head of the Swedish Academy said last week,
"His roots in two cultures allow him to take our own image and reflect it in a partially unknown and partially recognisable image, and it is incredibly fascinating."
Sadly, the will to exploit humane literary complexity and intellectual courage surfaces among Western politicos and pundits as easily as it has among the defensive elites of Istanbul.
Last Thursday, coincident with the first news of Pamuk's award, a minority of the members of the French National Assembly (the lower house of parliament) passed a bill introduced by the opposition Socialist Party to make it a crime in France to deny the Armenian genocide. Although President Chirac is unlikely to allow that bill to travel any further, he continues to play provocative games of his own with the Turkish application to the EU, games that seem to me to endanger the most promising signs of democratic advance in Turkey because they refuel defensive nationalist resentments.
As soon as the French Socialists introduced their bill, a number of the Turkish intellectuals who have faced persecution at home for speaking out about the Armenian massacres spoke out again, but this time to denounce the French bill:
“Writing history is not the job of states or politicians,” said novelist Elif Shafak, one of the authors quoted in yesterday’s edition of the liberal daily Radikal.“I consider what is happening in France as a negative development that leaves progressives and democrats in both France and Turkey in a difficult situation,” wrote Shafak, who was recently acquitted of “denigrating the national identity” in a novel dealing with the 1915-1917 massacres.
The bill, submitted by the French Socialist Party and apparently backed by many governing conservatives as well, provides for up to one year in jail and a 45,000-euro fine ($57,000) for anyone who says the killings were not genocide.
Turkish-Armenian journalist Hrant Dink, hit by one six-month suspended sentence for his writings on the Armenian question and again on trial for calling the killings genocide, said the bill was “stupid.”
In other words, Shafak and Dink are reminding us that many of our politicians and many of our pundits still don't get the point. How dare Parisian politicians or Toronto editorial writers imagine that they stand with the brave Turkish defenders of the freedom of expression and conscience by promoting a law that presumes to codify thought?
Without a doubt, the stupidest, most presumptuous tribute to Pamuk that I read last Friday was the finger-wagging spin of the editorial board of the Globe and Mail, who seem hardly to have noticed that Pamuk is a writer, much less a democrat. Like the nationalist zealots of Istanbul who are their mirror-image, the editors of the G&M twisted a moment of humane artistic triumph back to their own ethnocentric paranoia:
The efforts to silence Mr. Pamuk have outraged all those who value freedom of expression as a fundamental democratic right. The Nobel award coincides with a move by the French National Assembly to adopt legislation that would make it a crime to deny that what happened to the Armenians was indeed genocide. And in the Netherlands, candidates of Turkish origin have been barred from running for office if they continue denying the genocide. In each case, Turkey is being warned that it must acquire the maturity to acknowledge past misdeeds, no matter how painful, and allow its citizens to speak openly about them.
Do you follow that logic? I don't follow that logic. Elif Shafak does not follow that logic. (Fiachra Gibbons in the Guardian tells us that Orhan Pamuk has also denounced that logic, although I have been unable to find a statement from him about the French bill so far and would appreciate any links.)
Democracy 101: Which part of the distinction between free citizens and state power do we think that the zealots of Istanbul, of Paris, and of the Globe and Mail editorial board do not get? Is it important to our understanding of the advance of humane culture that we register and acknowledge the horror of the Armenian genocide? Of course it is. Is it the business of the state -- the Turkish state, the French state, the Canadian state -- to admit and to atone for such horrors in their nations' past? Of course it is. But is it the business of the state, any state that pretends to be a democratic state, to force the assent of any individual citizen to any doctrine at all? To criminalize the expression of still-dissenting opinions? To shift state responsibility on to individuals?
Anyone who thinks so has still not caught up with the Turkish renaissance, for which my own hopes are so high.
Literature 101: Och, but I have allowed my own political anger to deflect my attention from Orhan Pamuk's achievements as a writer. For those who have never read Pamuk before, or those who feel twitchy about fiction (you know who you are), I would suggest working backwards. The last of Pamuk's books to be translated and published here is his non-fiction meditation on his home city, Istanbul: Memories and the City (2005). The most recent of his novels is Snow (2004). They are both books for the ages. They are addressed to all of us who wonder where our corrupt and collapsing political systems have left us, however much we love and wish to salvage the good of our own cultures.
Orhan Pamuk has spoken and written out of political and cultural pressures more intense, more immediate, and more complex than most North Americans yet feel. Perhaps it is time we noticed that he is speaking and writing of us too.
Over at DailyKos, there is a post by OrangeClouds115 announcing a new web site called Recipe for America. This is the stated focus of the site :
Focus of This Project
We brainstormed a list of problems with the food system that our project might wish to address:
Problems with the Food System
1. Overproduction of commodities
2. Inefficient system of agricultural subsidies
3. Financial hardships for family farmers
4. Consolidation in agricultural industries
5. Obesity epidemic (& related health problems)
6. Energy inefficiency within the American food system
7. Lack of food safety
8. Lack of food labeling requirements (COOL, National Uniformity for Food Act, GMOs)
9. Over permissiveness of food labeling (structure/function statements)
10. Lack of nutrition in school lunches
11. Lack of food sovereignty
12. Food insecurity
13. Pesticide & synthetic fertilizer usage
14. Lack of regulation of GMOs
15. Inefficient water usage
16. Immigration & its affect on farm labor needs
17. Poor labor practices in slaughterhouses
18. Mistreatment of animals
19. Pollution by CAFOs
20. Regulation of Industrial Organics
21. rBGH
22. Soil erosion
Is Yeti in the house? I know he and I are both in (very different aspects of) the agriculture business. Any other Ag producers want to weigh in? I would expect no end of interest from the consumer side.
It looks like some time tomorrow the Site Meter down in the bottom right corner is going to kick over to show 250,000 visitors. This will come two days short of the third anniversary of the founding of Peace, order and good government, eh?. Since I'm usually caught napping by these things I thought I'd get out ahead of the game this time.
I started blogging spontaneously one night. I'd discovered where Blogger was, wondered how difficult it would be to set up and within an hour or so I was blogging. The name came just as spontaneously -- it just popped into my head while I was looking at the Blogger setup screen. Sometimes my best ideas come that way. On the other hand, not all the ideas I get that way are good ones.
My initial post concerned the leadership race that was then taking shape for the new Conservative Party of Canada. Regular readers won't be surprised to find out that I look forward to writing about a new leadership race for the same party real soon now. But I digress.
The ensuing three years have seen one platform change, several server moves and the addition of six additional authors to the bullpen (And now we are seven. I finally got to say it!), not to mention two federal election campaigns and assorted other wonders. I still vividly recall the day Paul Wells linked to a post I wrote -- I had stagefright for two days. It's been interesting, entertaining, occasionally frustrating and often educational (and a good part of all of that comes from the readers' comments). I think I'll stick around for a while and see if we can hit half a million visitors.
Thanks to all of the readers who stop by and participate in the conversation (even if you just yell at us in the privacy of your own minds instead of in public). And I'd also like to thank the other writers who have come on board here. I kept up a pretty torrid pace for the first year and a half or so but I found, as so many others have, that it's difficult to keep up a regular posting schedule unless you're being paid for it. Real life has a way of getting in the way of blogging and I'm grateful that so many quality people wanted to join in and help keep the content coming.
And one last thing: if I have a blogfather it's probably Steve Gilliard, though I don't imagine he's aware of it. It was his work at the now defunct NetSlaves that really got me thinking about the possibilities and made me wonder if there was a place for me in what some are calling the "new media". We're all still exploring the possibilities and I expect we will be for some time to come. (Which gives me an excuse to link to DemFromCt's post at Daily Kos about the latest Flu Wiki development. There's another project I got involved in that caught me by surprise.)
The conservative impulse is to keep what is old and to only change cautiously. When the reformer says, "we can do better", the conservative replies, "why would you think that?" A conservative (and by temperment I am a conservative) supports change only when it is execruciatingly clear both that the status quo isn't working, and that the proposed change has a good chance of being better than the status quo.
Or, to put it another way, when a reformer rushes up and says, "there's a fence down the middle of the road, that maskes no sense! We need to tear it down!" a real conservative's reply is "tell me why the fence was put up in the first place and I might let you take it down."
I'm reminded of this when considering Harper's plan to start getting elected Senators. The idea is that Senators would serve for eight years. Since actually electing them would require a constitutional change (and Ontario, for example, has said no way unless it gets more Senators) what Harper wants to do is have provinces run elections and then he'll appoint the people who were elected. The argument is, essentially, that democracy is good, elections are good and more elections are better. And that the Senate is a corrupt cesspool of retired pols, most of whom do nothing to earn their keep. With elections they'll have a mandate, with the possibility of not being re-elected they'll show up, and voters will enforce discipline on the upper chamber.
And, of course, who wants to run against "elections"? Harper is down on his knees begging the Liberal dominated Senate to get all uppity and block this, so he can run on "I believe in Democracy and Accountability and the Liberals don't."
But an elected Senate is potentially a really, really, bad idea. The Senate is almost equal in power to the House, except that it can't introduce spending legislation and that after 180 days the House can override a Senate veto. Other than that, the two chambers are co-equal.
People don't realize this since as Senators have no mandate they rarely really dig in their heals. The last major occasion is when Liberal Senators blocked the Free Trade Agreement until after the 1988 election - an exception which I would regard as legitimate, since Mulroney was not elected in 1984 with a mandate to make a deal which gave away significant amounts of Canada's sovereignty. (The majority of Canadians then voted against the FTA, but the Conservatives won a majority anyway, since the vote was split, and they were the sole free trade party.)
Once Senators have legitimacy they will start to actually use their power. Because the Senate's seat structure is not based on population, various underpopulated provinces will have more representation proportionally than those with higher populations. (Read: the Maritimes rock on this, and Ontario takes it on the chin, which is why the Ontario government thinks this is a bad idea.) What will inevitably happen is that there will come a cycle where one party controls the lower house and the other the top house. And then there'll be a showdown.
Now this may not seem like a bad thing to Americans, but frankly, our system, for all its flaws, has delivered. It has worked well - we have a good standard of living, a trade surplus and a budget surplus. We have a Westminister system which has taken for granted for over 100 years, the supremacy of the Commons. Going to damn near a true bicameral system is not a minor thing - it is a huge constitutional change to a system which, in its US incarnation, is currently imploding.
The conservative impulse shouldn't be to make such huge changes. But Harper isn't a small "c" conservative any more than George Bush is, or his Neocon allies were. Harper is an ideologue who looks to the south and sees a superior system which he wants to emulate. He is a decentralizer who wants to weaken the central government, and the office of the Prime Minister. Harper really believes that ineffective federal governments are better than effective federal ones, and he wants to make sure that Canada winds up with one.
And changing from an essentially bicameral system where the Senate was only there for emergency use, to a real bicameral system is one way of weakening the center and the Prime Minister.
Which is to say, for Harper the fact that an "elected" Senate will make the federal government weaker and less effective isn't a bug, it's a feature. And there are those who would agree with that. But if you aren't one of them, don't be fooled into thinking what you're voting for if you back this is a more "democratic" society. Because just voting doesn't make democracy. The more some voters votes count more than those of others, the less Democratic a system is, even if there is more voting.
Harper's new system would likely lead to a Constitutional crisis, it weakens the Federal government and the Prime Minister, and it is less representative and less Democratic, than the current system, in which MPs are elected in a way that is closer to proportional to the population than electing Senators will be.
So support it and Harper if those are things you want - but if they aren't, please don't.
Report Says Nonprofits Sold Influence to Abramoff
Five conservative nonprofit organizations, including one run by prominent Republican Grover Norquist, "appear to have perpetrated a fraud" on taxpayers by selling their clout to lobbyist Jack Abramoff, Senate investigators said in a report issued yesterday.The report includes previously unreleased e-mails between the now-disgraced lobbyist and officers of the nonprofit groups, showing that Abramoff funneled money from his clients to the groups. In exchange, the groups, among other things, produced ostensibly independent newspaper op-ed columns or news releases that favored the clients' positions.
...
The Senate report released yesterday states that the nonprofit groups probably violated their tax-exempt status "by laundering payments and then disbursing funds at Mr. Abramoff's direction; taking payments in exchange for writing newspaper columns or press releases that put Mr. Abramoff's clients in a favorable light; introducing Mr. Abramoff's clients to government officials in exchange for payment; and agreeing to act as a front organization for congressional trips paid for by Mr. Abramoff's clients."
...
The groups named in the report are Norquist's Americans for Tax Reform; the Council of Republicans for Environmental Advocacy, which was co-founded by Norquist and Gale Norton before she became secretary of the interior; Citizens Against Government Waste; the National Center for Public Policy Research, a spinoff of the Heritage Foundation; and Toward Tradition, a Seattle-based religious group founded by Rabbi Daniel Lapin.
...
The e-mails show that Abramoff and Norquist explicitly discussed client donations to Norquist's group in exchange for Norquist's support. The group's advocacy "appears indistinguishable from lobbying undertaken by for-profit, taxable firms," the report said.
Hat-tip to DemFromCt at Daily Kos.
When someone is saying something you don't like and may not have an answer for, tell him to shut up and turn off his mic.
Wheat Board ordered not to sow discontent
The Conservative government has banned the Canadian Wheat Board from advocating its continued existence as the monopoly seller of Western Canadian wheat and barley, adding fuel to a growing political fire.In a cabinet directive issued late last week, the government ordered the board not to directly or indirectly spend money on advertising, publishing or market research that would enable them to argue for the retention of the monopoly.
...
The ban is the latest development in the battle over the Wheat Board's future. The Conservative government has promised to end the board's monopoly, but it's far from clear whether a majority of farmers supports that position and the government has refused to commit to a plebiscite on the issue.
General David Richards, commander of NATO troops in Afghanistan, has just put a best-before date on the alliance's military mission in Afghanistan: six months.
Gen Richards said the country was at a tipping point, and warned that Afghans would likely switch their allegiance to resurgent Taliban militants if there were no visible improvements in people's lives in the next six months. "They will say, 'We do not want the Taliban, but then we would rather have that austere and unpleasant life that that might involve than another five years of fighting'," he said.
General Richards, among others, has been sending up these warnings for some months now, as have more senior NATO military leaders. From the more recent Guardian report:
Although western diplomats remain squeamish about publicly criticising Pakistan, military commanders, facing mounting casualties, are increasingly outspoken. At a hearing of the US Senate last month, Nato's supreme commander, General James Jones, said that Quetta in Baluchistan was the Taliban "headquarters". According to one report, Nato has traced the Taliban leader, Mullah Muhammad Omar, to an address in Quetta.
So today General Richards will be paying a visit to President Musharraf of Pakistan, a man of many allegiances, and they will talk politely about NATO intelligence that continues to detect Taliban troop movements and evacuations across the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. And for public consumption, at least, President Musharraf and many Western diplomats and politicians -- like Gordon O'Connor and Lewis MacKenzie -- will continue to pretend either that that is news to them or that they are doing all they can about it or that it isn't the issue anyway. Gordon O'Connor still can't think of a thing to do about Afghanistan except throw more bullets at it:
Canada's Defence Minister is confronting those NATO countries with troops deployed in relatively stable parts of Afghanistan — including Germany, France, Spain and Italy — saying they must lift the restrictions that prevent their soldiers from taking on the more dangerous tasks being shouldered by Canadians....
Defence Minister Gordon O'Connor said Sunday that he has raised Canada's concerns about those restrictions — called caveats — with the countries that have imposed them. Although he did not name them directly, it was clear Mr. O'Connor was referring primarily to Germany, France, Spain and Italy.
The Defence Minister also said he spoke with representatives of those countries that are sharing Canada's deadly burden in the south — the United States, Britain, the Netherlands, Romania and Estonia — when he attended a NATO meeting in Slovenia at the end of September.
“For about an hour and a half, I grabbed together the counties that are in the south with us to talk about our common challenges,” Mr. O'Connor told The Globe and Mail in a telephone interview. “In the meeting I encouraged them to lobby other NATO members to remove their restrictions.”
And the defence minister goes on to imply that our other NATO allies are perhaps just chicken for not leaping vaingloriously into southern Afghanistan along with us:
Asked if he thought the reluctance on the part of some countries to let their troops go to the more dangerous regions may be fed by fears that their troops could suffer casualties, the minister gave a gruff chuckle and said: “Well, that's your interpretation.”
In fact our defence minister seems to have been assigned a most inglorious role in this charade. On his own recent trip to Islamabad, he couldn't wangle a visit with Musharraf. Serious straight-talking with the Bush administration's trickiest piece on the board (for the time being) is hardly to be left to a Canadian minion. That's not what Canadian minions are for: our soldiers are meant to be keeping up the diversionary action in Afghanistan, and our politician-minions are meant to be cheerleading for a military mission that isn't working, that can't work because it is the wrong mission, our snake-oil salesmen all the while rationalizing the deaths of their fellow citizens for the sake of the greater imperial project. Anyone for a moving public performance by Minister O'Connor or General MacKenzie of "The Charge of the Light Brigade"?
For the time being, what Musharraf needs to survive in Pakistan, Musharraf will get, as I suspect General Richards at least knows. The Bush administration need Musharraf right now because they are focused on Iran. For their military bases in Baluchistan (which borders on both Afghanistan and Iran), apparently now serving as jumping-off points for forays into Iran by U.S. special forces, they are willing to blink at the accommodations Musharraf continues to make with the Taliban, with al-Qaeda, with all the border peoples who have been outraged by our historically inept invasion of their society.
And the accommodations Musharraf is making are classic. He would prefer to support the fundamentalists who cross back into Afghanistan to fight Canadian and British troops so that he can continue to suppress genuine national movements in the border provinces, particularly Baluchistan. And the Bush administration give every sign of knowing that and not caring. The Taliban and al-Qaeda are yesterday's news to them; and why should they care about a few dead Canadians or Brits?
General Richards perhaps believes that he can still discipline Musharraf's thinking a little more than the Americans have. Perhaps he thinks he can discipline the thinking of American strategists before that Thing at the back of the fridge begins to grow green fuzz. At least he is thinking -- about the military mission he commands, about the soldiers who are dying, about the population devastated by this war -- and, quite unlike our own puppet-spokespersons, he is trying to do his best with the human, military, and political realities he observes.
I wish him well, but I'm not optimistic.
The Harvest Moon - the full moon that occurs closest to the autumnal equinox - is the best known of our named moons. But the one that follows in October, the Hunter's Moon is probably the more significant event. While the pressure was there to get the crop off, there was still an residual feeling of the easy going days of summer in the Harvest Moon.
By the time of the Hunter's Moon, the easy going feeling has been replaced with a sense of urgency. Geese are taking their feeding flights stocking up for the southward migration. The bucks are sparring in preparation for the real event soon to begin. And the chipmunks leave the bird feeders with cheeks swollen with seeds for their winter stockpile. For the humans, too, there was a sense of urgency in years gone by to lay in both a winter's supply of firewood and food in preparation for the bone chilling cold of a prairie winter.
This year, the Hunter's Moon fell on this past Saturday and it was both early and unusually warm with the temperature still hovering in the mid teens near midnight. I couldn't pass up the appeal of a brilliant full moon on a warm fall evening with temperatures due to plummet in the next few days. So I wandered across our land easily navigating the trails in the open woodland without any light other than the big white globe in the sky and was surprised there was enough light to be able to see the colour of the remaining leaves.
I stood leaning on the fence rails of the pasture lost in thoughts of the significance of the Hunter's Moon to us and our fellow creatures both in my past and eras past. At some point I realized I was no longer alone. While my mind was wandering, I had been joined by three of our resident white tail deer. A doe we call B2 and her twins fawns had wandered to within 20 feet of me browsing on the remaining clover in the pasture.
The two does B1 and B2 are mother/daughter or sisters who moved in together last winter. It is impossible to tell them apart - the 1 and 2 refer to the number of fawns they have this year. But the "B girls" are easily told from other deer by an unusually prominent Roman nose. The Bs are big, pushing 140 pounds in their fall prime, and very aggressive. They are at the top of the pecking order among area does and even the young bucks have learned to stay out of the way of their slashing hooves. They and their fawns have first crack at any available food. Strangely, despite their aggressive manner with other deer, they are both very tame and will often come within 4 or 5 feet of us showing no alarm at these strange two legged creatures. (BTW - This is quite a dangerous thing to do for the inexperienced since more North American's are killed by deer than by bears every year.)
I called to B2 to let her know I was there since she had come from upwind and she came closer. We had our usual one sided conversation - I talked and she ate. The fawns, perhaps alarmed at their mother's tolerance for this strange creature, would flag and tear off across the pasture and then wander back. Meanwhile B2 was playing a game of her own. I would chase her out of the strawberry patch but, as soon as my back was turned, she would slip back in through the fence. She reminded me of one of our cats who knows damn well she isn't supposed to claw the carpet but does it anyway and then tears out of the room to avoid the spray bottle. B2 and the kids eventually tired of the games and drifted off into the lower pasture in pursuit of a meal without interruption. And I reluctantly gave up the Hunter's Moon for the comforts of my bed.
The next morning, as I was doing my usual morning chores, I looked up to see one of our elderly neighbours out for a morning drive - with his buggy and a team of horses. And my world seemed pretty good. All of which got me to thinking about Thanksgiving. I have a good many things to be thankful for. But, of all of them, the one for which I am most thankful is that I have the great good fortune of being able to live at least part of my life in an alternate reality. One that is far removed from the violence, bloodshed, hatred, pain, dishonesty and want that is the only reality for too many people in the world today. And I will fight as hard as I can to maintain as much of my alternative reality as possible for as long as possible.
And my Thanksgiving wish for all of our readers is that you, too, might have some piece of that alternative reality for your own.
I'm a few days late to this party. Nominations are now open for Robert McClelland's Canadian Blog Awards. I'll say what I always say this time of year: the biggest value of these awards is that it may lead you to discover some good blogging you didn't know about. And thanks to Robert for all the work he puts into this.
(Of course it goes without saying that I'm not drawing attention to this just because we're nominated in several categories. That has nothing whatsoever to do with it. Nothing at all. That's my story and I'm sticking to it.)
Via Accidental Deliberations, Linwood Barclay in the Toronto Star reminds us that the blogosphere doesn't have a monopoly on effective snark. Given the subject matter it's rather ironic for me to point to this as an example of good writing since irony is no longer being supported. You'll have to go read to understand.
No, this time I'm not talking about L'il Stevie, Doris or the rest of the usual suspects. I have been up to my ears for the last two weeks in local rural politics - the only thing dumber than federal politics (or at least that's my position until the next provincial election). I'm politicked out for the moment so I'm going to post about food. At least that's something I still enjoy.
My tastes may be a little eccentric. After all, I actually like Xmas fruit cake. Most stuffings (or dressing as they have always been called in my family) for fowl fail to make the grade. They are either soggy or too dry and often flavourless. A good dressing is not only a tasty side dish but should contribute to the flavour of the bird as well.
This is a recipe I pulled off the Manitoba Agriculture and Food website some time ago and modify to suit my taste.
Rye-Apple Stuffing
1 green apple, chopped
1 onion, chopped
1 celery stalk, chopped
6 tbsp butter 90 mL
5 slices dark rye bread, torn into small pieces
1 cup turkey or chicken broth 250 mL
1 cup dried cranberries, chopped 250 mL
1 egg, lightly beaten
salt and pepper, to taste
¼ cup brandy 50 mL
In medium skillet sauté apple, onion and celery in 4 tbsp (60 mL) of the butter for 3 minutes. Mix with bread crumbs. Add broth, cranberries, egg, salt and pepper. Mound into a greased casserole dish. Baste with remaining butter and apple brandy and bake at 350 F (180 C) for 50 minutes.
Makes 6 Servings
Ok, now here are the changes. First of all, forget about the casserole dish unless you are planning to make a whole bunch extra (in which case you have to bump up the quantities). If you can't safely cook a stuffed turkey, get out of the kitchen. Use any apple you have handy - usually a Mac around here. Five slices of bread isn't enough for a quail much less a turkey. I use about half pumpernickel and the rest can be pretty much anything although I prefer cracked wheat to add a little extra texture. I also throw in a handful of raisins and some mushrooms - we prefer our home grown shiitakes. And I add some chopped red and green peppers mostly for a little colour.
Saute everything except the bread. I add some sage and a pinch of curry powder and sometimes a bit of garlic. Add the brandy. I don't care much for nuts but, if you want to counterbalance all the fruit flavours, you might try adding a few chopped walnuts. Let cool enough that the egg doesn't start cooking when you stir it in. Add the bread and mix. And here's the key - add just enough of the chicken broth to barely moisten the bread. Anything more and the result is soggy.
The final result is a riot of earthy and fruity flavours that adds a subtle extra dimension to the flavour of the bird and looks good to boot. Around here the dressing is usually gone before the turkey. I don't claim to be a wine expert but there used to be a Manor St. David Sauternes that was inexpensive, totally unpretentious with quite a fruity flavour that would probably work quite well with this.
I'm not much into glazes on meat of any kind but here is a companion recipe for the stuffing.
Raspberry Glaze
¼ cup raspberry preserves 50 mL
2 tbsp coffee liqueur 30 mL
1 tbsp red wine vinegar 15 mL
2 tsp cornstarch 10 mL
¼ tsp ground ginger 1 mL
1 clove garlic, minced
In 2-cup microwave safe glass measuring cup combine preserves, liqueur, vinegar, cornstarch, ginger and garlic. Cook in microwave oven at HIGH (100%) power) 45 to 60 seconds or until thickened; stir. Use mixture as glaze, brushed over turkey during last ½ hour of roasting.
Experiment and have some fun.
Really quick, you guys.
What is it? The New Government of Canada? The New Canadian Government? Canada's New Government? (Look to the blue box on the right. Or snap to attention at this story.)
I'm an editor. I gotta know soon what the correct form of address for our elders and betters elected representatives is.
And I'm thinking letterhead, business cards, all that sort of stuff. Etiquette, y'know? We've got to get this right.
Even more serious: the Chicago Manual of Style and the Editors Association of Canada are waiting to hear from Ottawa -- or maybe just from Canadians. In other words: you. We can't get our footnotes and bibliographies right without a general decision.
So. What is it? This new ... thing ... we've got: what do we call it?
Updated update: see press release from women's groups after meeting with the minister, in comments below.
More evidence, if evidence were needed, that your New Government of Canada has learned its lessons at the knees (and likely on its knees) of some American masters, this lesson in particular:
"My goal is to cut government in half in twenty-five years, to get it down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub." -- Grover Norquist
Hard on the heels of last week's news that Status of Women Canada (SWC) has lost 40 per cent of its operational budget comes word of a new diktat from the department run by one of cabinet's biggest losers, the sad and ineffectual and utterly pathetic Bev Oda.
Two days ago, via the notice of the "five things" meme supported by progressive bloggers, a warning was sent up by pamused that changes to SWC's mandate had also been made:
The worst of it is that they have now banned ALL domestic advocacy and lobbying of governments with any funding received from SWC. What this means is that even though they've preserved the program funding available through the Women's Program, they've chopped at the knees those orgs who utilize that funding for anything other than service or program delivery. Case in point: without funding for advocacy from SWC, groups like the Canadian Council of Muslim Women et al could not have successfully mobilized and advocated against Sharia law in Canada (religious arbitration). So today's changes signify a brutal blow.
That redefinition of the department's mandate has now been confirmed on SWC's updated website.
In the progblog alert of 2 October, pamused expands on her earlier interpretation of this move:
Interesting thing about the advocacy ruling today. Because charities cannot advocate or lobby on their constits behalf they were already stuck in a weird position of trying to "educate" government about their issues, but not lobby, under pain of Revenue Canada revoking their charitable status. There has been discussion of this changing because groups like Heart & Stroke and smaller ones like women's shelters were always at risk of violating the rules just because they were trying to develop proper health and legal policies. ie. govt. wanted their input, cause they are front line, but had to jump through hoops to do it legitimately.The only way to fund activities like this, was through SWC. And now, these groups are screwed and so is government in the long run. even on non-controversial files, like cancer.
Just before I launch into my usual rant about democracy and the anti-democratic tendencies of our New Government of Canada, I will make one historical observation that may complicate things a bit. Certain especially elevated notables of our federal civil service, most famously the grey men/persons of the Finance Department and RevCan (or whatever the hell we call it these days), have been committed neo-lib slashers of social programs for generations. Their encroachments on our social consensus are what pamused is referring to when she mentions the difficulties that Canadian charitable organizations already have in obeying "the rules." Whoever the first movers were of the recent CPC government assault on funding for women's programs, aboriginals, museums, the Court Challenges program, and so on, their socially conservative ideology would have dovetailed very neatly with the ideological pathologies of the most powerful (often Liberal) members of the mandarinate in Ottawa, who have had many earlier successes in denying creative housing programs in Canada, eg, or in making sure that you never get a disability pension or even a disability tax deduction unless you are at death's door. Charming people. They probably feel bad about the museums, though.
Back to democracy. We all remember John Baird's rationale for cutting the Court Challenges program, the rationale that presumably also pretends to justify any refusal of federal funding to groups that "advocate" on behalf of women still facing legal structural disadvantage:
I just don't think it made sense for the government to subsidize lawyers to challenge the government's own laws in court.
Now, there is a man who has not grasped the difference between a particular elected representative government and the state -- ie, the people, all the people, all the time, their protective symbol in Canada being the Crown, but never doubt: the Crown are us, all of us -- and the responsibility that the one owes the other.
A democratic government always owes all the people free access to study, to criticize, to organize against, and to resist laws or institutional structures that can be shown to discriminate against citizens in ways that violate our constitution. It is a frightening state, certainly not a democracy, that would suddenly declare that no better law is possible than the ones it has conceived of.
Elected governments, the seldom-quite-inspiring-enough collections of politicians who attempt to make or improve our laws, often under the influence of narrow ideologicall commitments or even -- perish the thought, but yes -- venal considerations ... elected governments are passing things, cute in their presumptions, perhaps, but here today, gone tomorrow (let's hope).
We the people, all of the people, are always here. For many of us, elections don't necessarily work very well, a fact recognized by our Charter above all. Majority rule is tyranny, and in a democracy it must always be checked by structures that ensure that minority groups can make their voices heard. Equal access to our courts, to challenge discriminatory or merely flaccid laws, would be one such structure. Many of the programs formerly funded by Status of Women Canada have been another such commitment to the advance of democracy, of liberty for all our citizens.
No one advocates through our courts or to our elected representatives without money. A tiny but powerful minority in our society have always had that money privately, but it has been our civil consensus until now that we will support other groups fighting for liberties that our laws do not yet protect effectively. It seems to me little short of an attempt at a coup that the current CPC government would declare an end to all advocacy and lobbying except by those who are rich.
Or perhaps those who are in ideological favour. When news of the new constraints to be placed on SWC funding first broke, the ever-prescient sparqui at Bread and Roses wondered:
For example, is it not in the realm of possibility that 6 months from now we see Status of Women money going to a teen abstinence program?
Gosh. Why would sparqui be doubting that such a program was deeply desired by the women of Canada? What other struggles could they possibly be facing?
Potentially embarrassing information requests "amber-lighted" by bureaucrats
The federal government is singling out the access to information requests of some Canadians for closer scrutiny and special treatment, despite Prime Minister Stephen Harper's sharp criticism of the practice when he was in opposition.According to an e-mail dated June 12, by Citizenship and Immigration Canada access co-ordinator Heather Primeau, the government is ''amber lighting'' access requests that are considered to be more politically sensitive.
''The amber light process is a heads up process to advise senior management of upcoming access to information releases that may attract media or political attention,'' says a note at the bottom of Primeau's e-mail in which she alerts a series of departmental officials to the upcoming release of an ''amber lighted'' access request.
The e-mail, which outlines five things being released that could result in questions to the government, was sent to 19 officials in the Citizenship and Immigration department. Among them was Brooke Pigott, a policy advisor in Citizenship and Immigration Minister Monte Solberg's office.
Primeau's e-mail was received by researcher Ken Rubin as part of an access request to Citizenship and Immigration Canada on another subject.
Hat-tip to Eugene Plawiuk.
Public Safety Minister Stockwell Day says greater oversight of national security operations by elected politicians can help restore public confidence in the wake of the Maher Arar debacle.
In an interview Sunday on CTV’s Question Period, Day noted that the United States, Britain and Australia all have legislative committees that monitor their security forces.He suggested a similar all-party committee of Parliament could keep tabs on both the RCMP and the Canadian Security Intelligence Service.
Day was more ambiguous on whether there should also be a stronger civilian review agency to monitor the RCMP — along the lines of the Security Intelligence Review Committee, which already oversees CSIS.
By all means borrow ideas that will help improve accountability but let's not pretend that the American example has worked perfectly. Clearly it hasn't. With a majority government in power intelligence can still be politicized and misused and abuses can still happen. Without a great deal of care in setting this up, minority MPs can easily be muzzled by secrecy oaths.
I hope there's a great deal more to come than we've been given here.