April 2007 Archives

TORONTO, April 27 /CNW/ - The Report of The Ipperwash Inquiry will be released to the public at 10 a.m. on Thursday, May 31, 2007, Sidney B. Linden, the Commissioner of the Inquiry, announced today. The Report will be transmitted to Attorney General Michael Bryant shortly before the public release. The public release will take place at the Forest Memorial Community Center (Kimball Hall) at 6276 Townsend Line, Forest, Ontario, where the Inquiry's hearings were held. The Report will be available on the Inquiry's web page http://www.ipperwashinquiry.ca at the time of release and copies will be distributed to media in Toronto. Printed copies and CD-ROMs will be available for purchase from Publications Ontario after the date of release.

...

NOTE: There will be a lockup for the media in Forest before the public
release. The details will be announced later and also posted on the Inquiry's
website.

We heard in March that Justice Linden and his staff had finished their report on time. We assume that it was then passed on to Premier Dalton McGuinty, and wouldn't you like to have been a fly on that wall?

For those who need a refresher, the CBC has kept a timeline of testimony to the inquiry here.

Over those four days in February 2006, thwap and I and a couple of other people at babble.ca did our (admittedly clumsy) best to keep up live summaries of Mike Harris's testimony to the inquiry. Even if you weren't following the case at the time, you just know what I am going to tell you of Mike Harris's testimony, don't you. Shortest Mike Harris: "I don't recall."

If Harris's testimony were to be believed, you'd have to think that, as premier, the man did almost nothing except play golf and go to splendid dinners. Aides told him things; he went to meetings but he can't recall who else was there or what he said; things happened ... Mistakes Were Made. But nobody, y'know, actually Made Them. Or if somebody did, it wasn't Mike Harris.

And Dudley George died. The OPP fired on unarmed protestors, and Dudley George died.

All the way through Harris's testimony, I was regretting not having been on top of things the previous November, when Harris's senior aide Deb Hutton testified. Hutton was and is the lynchpin -- I very much want to see the commission's assessment of her testimony. I doubt that we'll be watching anyone thrown under a bus here: Harris was certainly refusing to take much responsibility for anything when he testified, but it seems believable that Hutton was not an, ah, passive player in the events of September 1995.

Watch also for the commission's assessment of the testimony of Charles Harnick, attorney general of Ontario under Mike Harris, who quoted Harris as having said to representatives of the OPP at one crucial meeting: "I want the fucking Indians out of the park." Harris and others have denied he said that; Harris can't recall knowing who was at that meeting, so how can he have been giving orders?

I have high expectations of the commission's report. It was an education watching Justice Linden and the lead commission counsel, Derry Millar, riding herd on the multitude of lawyers parsing every word of every other lawyer's questions to the witness. Don't fail us, guys.

Gee, thwap: you and I should be in that media lock-up. If I knew where the POGGE piggy-bank had got to, I might try hassling someone for accreditation. ;-)

Keb' Mo', solo on a Robert Johnson tune called Love In Vain.

And Keb' Mo' with some help, including a drummer who really seems to enjoy his work. Dangerous Mood.

We can all relax. It was just a technical glitch.

The NDS, Afghanistan's intelligence police, have been accused of beating, choking, starving, freezing and whipping suspected Taliban insurgents within their secret headquarters in order to garner more information from them, after they have been handed over by Canadian forces.

Officials inside NDS now say corrections officers and RCMP in Afghanistan will have access to NDS and other prisons as well.

NDS authorities say the lack of access to prisoners was a communications breakdown rather than a deliberate attempt at concealing instances of abuse.

Communication was reportedly reestablished over the past week by a series of phone calls between Ottawa and Kandahar.

"That technical problem has been solved in a few days so there is no problem," one NDS official told CTV News.

I'm having a lot of trouble with the abysmally low level of public debate about Canada's current commitments to a combat mission in Afghanistan.

I mean to write a cool-headed rational critique of the sentimentalized crap that we are hearing right now from the government and our defence establishment and from most of the opposition. I do mean to do that, although I'm feeling overwhelmed at the moment by the willingness of so many to collude in stupidity.

But the politics is crap. From all sides, it is crap. Afghanistan is a beautiful country; the Afghans are a beautiful people; and we cannot help them by pretending that we know how to be good Afghans. We just plain bloody obviously do not.

Canadian soliders are dying in Afghanistan right now because we are one of Dick Cheney's subplots. Maybe our prime minister and defence minister know that and are not admitting it, in which case they are evil. Maybe they don't know it, in which case they are stupid.

May the rest of us rise above them all.

If you hate war, remember that innocent people are dying right now for the sake of nothing more than some nerdy Canadian's public profile:

ETA: Sorry -- I was crying about Afghanistan, never mind Canada, when I found that YouTube, so I forgot to pay tribute to the artists. That is the Clancy Brothers singing Eric Bogle's classic anti-war song. And as year follows year, I keep wondering: if the song and the thought convince anyone but me, why are the innocent still being blown apart by the powerful?

Who'll come a-waltzing Mathilda ... with me?

By way of explaining why Harper wouldn't consider asking for Gordon O'Connor's resignation, an anonymous Conservative source is quoted thusly in the Globe and Mail.

"If it's interpreted as us wavering, or any weakening of resolve that somehow we're on the wrong course, those questions would get asked," a source told The Globe and Mail.

"The Taliban would see it as a positive thing."

So it turns out that while Gordon O'Connor and Stephen Harper have been standing up in the House of Commons to assure us that everything is under control in Afghanistan, they've known perfectly well it wasn't the case.

The Harper government knew from its own officials that prisoners held by Afghan security forces faced the possibility of torture, abuse and extrajudicial killing, The Globe and Mail has learned.

But the government has eradicated every single reference to torture and abuse in prison from a heavily blacked-out version of a report prepared by Canadian diplomats in Kabul and released under an access to information request.

Initially, the government denied the existence of the report, responding in writing that "no such report on human-rights performance in other countries exists." After complaints to the Access to Information Commissioner, it released a heavily edited version this week.
...
Little of this is new, none of it is surprising. In March, when the U.S. State Department issued its annual report, it made clear that Afghan prisons, where Canada consigns detainees captured by its troops, were rife with torture, abuse and corruption. The report echoed equally grim assessments issued earlier by the United Nations and Afghanistan's own independent Human Rights Commission.

Those who followed the Scooter Libby trial will know that one of its most persistent and disturbing subtexts was the cosy -- some might say overly cosy, some might even say incestuous – relationship between the Washington press corps and the Bush administration.

Me, if I were MSNBC’s Tim Russert (and you will have noticed that I’m not, but let’s just suppose), after Cheney aide Cathie Martin’s testimony about my show's being the best place for the VP to “control message” (“a tactic we often used”; “it’s our best format”), I would have been too embarrassed ever to show my face in Washington again, much less on network television. If I were Robert Novak or Judith Miller and had been exposed, not as a brave defender of the First Amendment but as a witness to and perhaps a conduit for a potential crime, I would just shut up permanently.

But they do things differently in Washington. Those were just the first and worst names on the roll of disgrace, which appears to include every American journalist to whom a cocktail sausage and a chance to rub elbows with power matter more than, oh, say, the principles of the profession that would give some meaning to all the blustering defences of the freedom of the press (in which I happen to believe desperately m’self).

Yesterday David Halberstam died, at the age of 73, in a highway accident near San Francisco, on his way to an interview for his next book. Halberstam was a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who knew how to do a little more than scarf down cocktail sausages and grin gratefully at Dick Cheney for showing up and raising the ratings:

Tall, square-jawed and graced with an imposing voice so deep that it seemed to begin at his ankles, Mr. Halberstam came into his own as a journalist in the early 1960s covering the nascent American war in South Vietnam for The New York Times.

His reporting, along with that of several colleagues, left little doubt that a corrupt South Vietnamese government supported by the United States was no match for Communist guerrillas and their North Vietnamese allies. His dispatches infuriated American military commanders and policy makers in Washington, but they accurately reflected the realities on the ground.

For that work, Mr. Halberstam shared a Pulitzer Prize in 1964. Eight years later, after leaving The Times, he chronicled what went wrong in Vietnam — how able and dedicated men propelled the United States into a war later deemed unwinnable — in a book whose title entered the language: “The Best and the Brightest.”

...

President John F. Kennedy was so incensed by Mr. Halberstam’s war coverage that he strongly suggested to The Times’s publisher, Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, that the reporter be replaced. Mr. Sulzberger replied that Mr. Halberstam would stay where he was. He even had the reporter cancel a scheduled vacation so that no one would get the wrong idea.

Halberstam’s reporting was so tough, his writing so graceful, and his commitment so sustained over the years that it seems fitting to call him a historian too, as his wife does, as do those of us who remember his devastating early portrait of Robert McNamara in The Best and the Brightest (1972, and confirmed so pathetically by McNamara too many decades later).

Perhaps the New York Times and everyone else was caught off guard by Halberstam’s sudden death. The tributes I’ve seen so far don’t begin to touch on the difference – the vast abyss, actually – between the independent, critical, informed, intelligent, principled journo culture he exemplified and the tawdry media circuses that seem to have become part of the official shell-game, certainly in the U.S. And if you think that that couldn’t happen in Canada, well ...

Does anyone remember how to do independent journalism any more? And if anyone did, would there be anyone listening?

Ave atque vale, David Halberstam. Well done.

Here's a couple from what looks like a pretty recent Allman Brothers show. Statesboro Blues.

And a long, slow one called Worried Down With The Blues.

Perhaps the simple most important thing that CAnada should be doing, as US citizens like women (who just lost a good chunk of their abortion rights) and gays and blacks and others decide that the American Dream has become the American nightmare, and there's a good chance that their children will be worse of than their parents and that their civil rights will never really recover from the Bush assault, is to set up agressive immigration outreach. We should be convincing these people, who are often amongst the most creative and hardworking Americans around, to come to Canada. In particular, though I wouldn't say it openly, I would recruit gays particularly heavily.

The US rose to predominance on generations of refugees, either economic or policial, from other countries - plucking the best and brightest, and bringing them to America, where they were given freedom and opportunity.

As freedom is, rather than being on the march, under assault throughout the world - one winning strategy is to be one of the few nations that sticks by its guns and remains dedicated to true freedom and opportunity and a chance for everyone. Many think this will be Europe, but Europe is slowly tightening its grip on governance, and is in real danger of a big swing rightward. So, for that matter, is Canada. But Canada remains more of a liberal country than most in the world and there is another choice available to us.

Elizabeth May:

There’s something wrong with Jack Layton if he’d rather open up discussions with the Taliban than the Green party

I think it's simply outstanding that you want Canadians to have real information about the costs of taking action against the effects of climate change. Now if your government would stop cutting programs that might provide useful information and actually talk to people whose work might form the basis for calculating the costs of not taking action, we might be able to have a useful discussion.

Thanks in advance,
pogge

PS: Over the long haul the price at the pump is going up either way. I know it, you know it and I'll bet all your economics experts know it, too.

I took a course once from SFU’s token Marxist Economics professor. He seemed moderately cool, and I saw him around now and then after that. Then he retired, and of course I didn’t keep track of him. I assumed he was basically doing retired-person stuff. Then I was reading an article about Venezuela and realized it was by him, and it turns out he went to Venezuela ‘cause that’s where the action is when it comes to leftism. Then I noticed he’d written a small book, which I suggested the SFU library order. It has, I’ve been reading it, and while I’d say it’s overall pretty full-on socialist for the taste of most poggers, it has one bit that sums up the core tactical challenge for an NDP or similar government better than I’ve ever seen.
I’d been thinking vaguely along these lines for a long time, but this sums up the situation far more clearly than I’d ever been able to bring it in my mind, let alone express. So I thought I’d share this little excerpt.

All other things equal, a government cannot encroach upon capital without negative-sum results. This has always been the wisdom of conservative economists.

Yet it is essential to understand that the conclusions of the neoclassical economists are embedded in their assumptions--and particularly relevant here is the assumption that all other things are equal. Consider two simple examples, rent control and mineral royalties. If you introduce rent controls (at an effective level), the conservative economist predicts that the supply of rental housing will dry up and a housing shortage will emerge.

A number of other bloggers have already pointed to this post from Dave at The Galloping Beaver as a must read and I'm joining them. And when you finish that, check out pretty shaved ape's response at Canadian Cynic.

So, ok: we know that the Liberals and the Greens are drowning in ridicule collaborating in absurdity done like dinner co-operating (with an emphasis on the operating) in Central Nova.

But wait! We are missing two pieces of the puzzle, two slices of the bigger electoral pie, if you like, and in fact they are the bigger slices if we are working, as all good wonky geeks do, I gather, from the stats in the last election. Those stats last time looked like this:

Peter G. MacKay CON 17134 40.66% X
Alexis MacDonald NDP 13861 32.89%
Dan Walsh LIB 10349 24.56%
David Orton GRN 671 1.59%
Allan H. Bezanson ML 124 0.29%

So, all snerking aside, won't someone think of Peter "Moonstruck" MacKay and his Dipper challenger? (I understand the nominee this time is likely to be Louise Lorefice, Alexis MacDonald having gone on to other wonderful things, which she no doubt deserves.)

How can Mr MacKay and Ms Lorefice brand redirect attention to their (considerably more important) contest in order to wrest media attention back from the Green Liberals, who seem to have exhausted overnight any possibility of rational discussion of the environment (see Liberal history), a Fraser Institute--free economy (see Green history), shifty backroom politics, and enforced pregnancy (May wants to resurrect therapeutic abortion committees)?

What would the Conservative Party in the person of Mr MacKay have in common with the NDP that would make a nice media-friendly meme to relieve us all from thinking about the Dion-May catastrophe (and maybe get it off the main page of progblogs)?

I have the answer.

Knitting.

The move was a reprisal, May says

Green Party Leader Elizabeth May has vowed to make Foreign Affairs Minister Peter MacKay pay for a controversial decision to merge the former Progressive Conservative party with the right-wing Canadian Alliance.

May told the Star yesterday she plans to build a political coalition that will punish MacKay for breaking a promise not to sell out the old PC party, which he merged with the Canadian Alliance in 2003.

This politics done differently stuff sure is confusing. And I don't think it's my hangover.

The Dion/May non-compete agreement is an historic example of putting principle above partisanship and truly represents doing politics differently. But Mackenzie King did it too so it's actually doing politics in the traditional Canadian manner so what's everyone so excited about?

The party (NDP) that insisted that the Conservatives' Hot Clean Air Act should be completely rewritten by an all-party committee — a process that resulted in what's probably the best piece of legislation on the issue we've seen yet — is viciously partisan and can't get past its ancient tribal hatreds. On the other hand, the two parties whose Deputy Leader (Libs) expressed contempt for the NDP's efforts and whose leader (Greens) said the whole process was a waste of time and then subsequently (Libs and Greens) were quite pleased to take credit for the results, are sterling examples of non-partisanship in action.

For all those who are feeling mistreated and abandoned by politicians you thought you could trust: you need some blues. Here's Robben Ford with When I Leave Here. Seems appropriate.

And a bonus track from the same show: Chevrolet.

... I'm going to give my candidate in Central Nova all the support I possibly can. Because if Elizabeth May can't at least come out on top of the NDP in that riding now, you can stick a fork in her, she's done. Bear in mind that the Dipper came second to MacKay in that riding last time.

This has been another edition of Thoroughly Cynical Political Analysis brought to you by the letters W, T, F and the question mark.

Well, since I was just talking about Monsanto, how about them GM crops? I noticed a minor facet in a broader article the other day which indicates that GM cotton in India isn’t just making the farmers dependent on monopoly corporate suppliers, isn’t just leading to increased (expensive and ecologically damaging) inputs of things like pesticides, herbicides and fertilizers, after all that it isn’t even leading to decent yields! The article, which discusses the farm crisis in India and the rapid rise in farmer suicides, has this to say about harvests:

Just months from now, Vidharbha could see its first 100 per cent Bt cotton season. Bt cotton accounted for over 60 per cent of acreage last season. As acreage under it rises, so do the risks taken by the farmer. The Maharashtra government admits Bt cotton has fared very poorly in rain-fed regions . . . This gets more worrying when you look at the record of the last few years. The government began the last season's harvest with boasts of a "record" 350 lakh quintal "bumper crop." The claim was made by the State's Minister of Marketing, Harshvardhan Patil. And this grand success was swiftly credited to Bt cotton in some media reports. As the run of events punctured these claims, the figure was scaled down more than once. This is further confirmed by how little of cotton the official agencies have procured. For all of them together, the figure has not crossed 70 lakh quintals. And private traders are believed to have picked up around 110 lakh quintals.

You can do it the way Mark Steyn does it: write something with so much appeal to wingnuts with more money than brains that they'll buy up large quantities of the book and then give them away. See Hunter at Daily Kos have some fun with an email he received which includes this:

Now, for a limited time, Human Events is making Mark Steyn's America Alone available to you ABSOLUTELY FREE.

The whole Hunter post is worth a read.

A little over three years ago I wrote of Belinda Stronach that "I'd sooner vote for a garden gnome." Apparently Stronach has decided to spare me from having to make that choice.

Works for me.

As usual, corporations only want laissez faire for themselves. Monsanto of course has always been pretty big on reduced regulation and government intervention. They don't want people going around deciding whether their GM crops or their additives and hormones and crap are safe, they don't want governments helping local farmers to continue using local seed, and so on and so forth. All pretty nasty and selfish, but the right wing mantra is that of course that's not *really* nasty selfishness. No, no, it's just that free markets with free information are efficient and allow the sovereign consumer to make optimum choices, so corporations demanding that they not be regulated or impeded from making gobs of cash are just trying to make a better world for all. Of course, Monsanto would basically not exist at all if it weren't for a form of government-imposed monopoly lately called "intellectual property", but let's gloss over that. No, what really makes it amazingly obvious what a blatant lie the "just backing efficient markets" defense of corporate greed is, is cases like this one, where Monsanto the anti-regulation free marketeers push for regulations to stop milk sellers from telling consumers that they don't use Monsanto's bovine growth hormone. Yeah, that's a free market, sure.

This is only one poll, but it's not a good one for Liberals. It seems that Dion has abysmal ratings, while Conservative PM Stephen Harper has good ones. Dion is less popular than his party, while Harper is more popular than his.

Although the Conservatives are short of the committed support necessary to form a majority government, Stephen Harper has a clear advantage over Liberal Leader Stephane Dion. Forty-two percent of Canadians choose Harper as the best PM followed by Dion at 17%, Layton at 16%, Duceppe at 7% and Elizabeth May at 4% (the rest chose none of the above or were unsure). At this point in time Stephen Harper personally may be in majority territory but his party is not.

The Conservatives ran a series of attack ads on Dion a while back and they seem to have worked. Very bad news for Dion and that sort of thing is very hard to recover from, because once there's a storyline, people tend to stick to it. Time for Dion to choose his own storyline and run his own concerted ad campaign. Done right, and it'll be worth it. Personally I think he should forget the "man of environmentalism" thing and move back to "who do you want fighting for Canada?" Portray himself as the strong man who stood up to Quebec, and Harper as the week man who can't stand up to Bush. Portray Harper as a sell-out to US interests by hammering him on softwood lumber, which strikes at areas that he needs to win; for Quebec, hit him hard on Afghanistan, which is very unpopular in Quebec and which Harper rammed down Canadians throats.

Prohibition of marijuana use and sale does not significantly effect how much is used; has not prevented the industry from flourishing; costs a great deal; is a significant source of income to organized crime, and costs both the Canadian government, and the government of BC a great deal in lost tax revenues.

While it's difficult to determine the exact size of an illegal industry, it's clear that the BC Marijuana industry is very large. The RCMP estimated that in 2005 the industry was 7.5 billion, clocking it in as the third largest industry in BC – after forestry at 10 billion, and construction at 7.9 billion. BC's GDP in 2005 was 145.5 billion – which means that Marijuana cultivation makes up about 5.1% of BC's GDP. Marijuana is, also, and more troublesomely, an export crop. Again, it's difficult to determine numbers, but based on Easton's (2004, Fraser Institute) calculations, as of 2000 it appears that about half the crop was going out of the country and that majority of the remaining production was exported to other Canadian provinces.

Treating Marijuana the same way as tobacco – taxing it just enough to make legal production cheaper than illegal production or smuggling, would yield significant tax revenues. While not all of the value of the industry isn't being captured right now (for example, equipment sales are taxed) adding a sin tax would lead to tax revenues of a little over 2 billion dollars annually. (Easton, 2004, I am assuming the domestic market has not grown significantly over the last 7 years.)

Hat-tip to the Jurist for pointing out this op-ed by Gerry Nicholls in the Toronto Star. And the Wanker of the day award to Nicholls for pulling the same stunt that the Beltway Kool Kidz keep pulling south of the border: using an argument from popularity without even proving that his argument is popular.

Simply put, Canadians are growing sick and tired of a big and inefficient government, that's taking more and more of their money and delivering less and less in return.

The reason Harper is tapdancing around the middle and trying to look like a moderate is precisely because he knows the majority of Canadians don't share his original ideological vision. That at least makes him a more realistic observer of the political climate than Gerry Nicholls.

From Ian Welsh in a post at The Agonist about free trade and NAFTA.

Now I support free trade. One day, during my life, I hope to see some of it.

How about a nice long, slow blues? The Fabulous Thunderbirds. Real Gone Lover.

Hot cross buns, hot cross buns,
One a penny, two a penny,
Hot cross buns.

If you have no daughters, give them to your sons,
One a penny, two a penny,
Hot cross buns.

Yes, you can have my mum’s recipe on the turn, but you have to listen to the sermon first.

Our text for the day, apart from the lovely old rhyme and the recipe, is the blogswarm that begins today, this Good Friday, called Blog against Theocracy.

Person of faith though I still seem to be, I’m all in favour of blogging against theocracy. From childhood I understood in my Presbyterian/United Churcher nerves why the early (and most pious) European exiles to this continent insisted that there be no “established” religions here, that a firm line be drawn between state and church, between the things that are Caesar’s and the things that are God’s.

It was people of faith – often people of persecuted faiths -- who understood most deeply why freedom of conscience matters and how serious an offence to conscience any state-authorized view of religion is. To those people of faith we all owe the most important clauses of our bills and declarations and charters of human rights and freedoms. Thought is free, and your mind is your own.

Well, that was the theory. To committed democrats, it still is, but the last two decades have left many of us spluttering in disbelief at the fuzzing of principled distinctions between public and personal, policy and conscience, at the highest levels of government. For a long time Canadians may have been justified in assuming that their public culture was immune to Clintonesque sentimentalizing of principle, never mind George Bush’s “faith-based initiatives,” but that time has passed. We live now with a government perfectly willing to fuzz for its base, to intrude upon conscience, to divert public money from public institutions to private sectarian groups, to parody the ideals of liberation movements by subsidizing the “equality” of the privileged, to insinuate that any citizen who dares to speak critically of the government’s defence and foreign policies is a traitor.

Theocracies mess with people’s minds, and to a democrat there aren’t many sins worse than that. Every mind in its most secret recesses is sacred, which is why democracies must continually reaffirm the silence of the state on matters of faith, so as never to violate the beautiful reality of a single soul.

Here endeth the lesson. And I’m sorry: we don’t have any wine to pass around. We do have some bread, though.

... but fifteen British sailors have been handed over, fully corporeal and apparently sound of spirit, to the British embassy in Tehran and will be going home tomorrow.

I don't mean to be too flip about this development. I hated the brinkmanship; I'm glad it's over; and I'm glad Dick Cheney no longer has these sailors as cheap excuses for the next war he unquestionably still hankers after. I pretty much accept Dave's reading, at the Galloping Beaver, of the problems with Iran's claims according to the law of the sea, and I never forget what happened to Canadian photojournalist Zahra Kazemi at the hands of the Iranian regime in 2003. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad would generously be described as a loose cannon, although he's proving himself a clever player, but the Iranians have one undeniably superior claim against any imperial moves made against Iran -- it's their country.

As we have known for some time, though, there is already a mid-level destabilization campaign being conducted against Iran from the north, reportedly through Baluchi militants from Pakistan "encouraged and advised" -- and perhaps funded -- by American officials.

Pakistani government sources say the secret campaign against Iran by Jundullah was on the agenda when Vice President Dick Cheney met with Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf in February.

I'll bet it was. I'll bet it was a lot higher on the agenda than the faked scolding Cheney is supposed to have given Musharraf about Pakistan's porous border regions to the north with Afghanistan, a PR cover clearly meant for consumption by the sweet-minded innocents who still support the NATO mission in Afghanistan. Cheney and Bush have military installations in Baluchistan; they have ways of getting money to any groups they choose; and their own special forces are undoubtedly entering Iran from the north as well.

To anyone trying to stop this madness, my best wishes. Cheney and Bush are not going to be stopped by sweet reason, though.

h/t to sparqui and transplant at Bread and Roses.

The last time I used that title on a post it was concerning Maher Arar and eventually we got one. I'm not taking credit for that but it's worth a try.

Cowboys for Social Responsibility points out this interesting bit of news from Don Martin at The National Post.

RCMP whistle-blowers had been trying since the fall to drop their bombshell on the public record, but the public accounts committee voted repeatedly to keep them off the witness stand and their documents suppressed from the public record.

A one-vote margin of victory on a last-ditch in-camera motion finally allowed RCMP officers to spill the beans in public last week to trigger a national ruckus and an independent investigation. Had the vote gone the other way, the code of RCMP silence would have covered Parliament Hill indefinitely.

But I'm still puzzled. We have a minority government and I would think that means the Cons are a minority on that committee. If they were winning the battle up until that last vote, doesn't that mean that MPs from other parties were supporting them? Someone please correct me if I'm wrong.

If the Conservatives have already tried to prevent any light being shed on this mess, how much confidence can we have in Stockwell Day's "independent" investigation? It's a rhetorical question and the answer is: not freakin' much.

And aside from a public inquiry, there are a number of MPs we need to unemploy. Let's start with Stephen Harper.

I don't have a friggin' clue how long we'll be in Afghanistan but I'll say it in a way that makes it sound brave and noble.

Is it just me or has this guy been phoning it in since he became a cabinet minister?

H/T to the Jurist who has more.

Hat-tip to Mr. Sinister for this:

Asked why the Conservatives' new ad – which targets Dion's rejection of the notion of "fiscal imbalance" – appears only in French and will air only in Quebec, starting today, Baird was matter-of-fact.

"I think the real focus is, in the next campaign, will obviously be – part of the big focus – will be on Quebec, where we have great potential to grow, great potential to move forward," he said.
...
Baird boasted that the "policy of respecting provincial jurisdiction espoused by Prime Minister Harper is working" and resulted in the separatist Parti Québécois being relegated to third place in last week's provincial election.

We didn't need Baird to tell us that the Conservatives are focusing hard on Quebec. All we had to do was follow the money. But while I'm no expert on Quebec politics, one impression I've gotten very strongly over the years is simply this: you take Quebec voters for granted at your peril.

And we all know Canada's Petulant Prime Minister™ hates surprises.

You may recall that a while back a deal between Canada's Rapidly Aging Government™ and Boeing was threatened when Canada's Unelected Cabinet Minister™ decided that not enough of the pork benefit was going to his home province of Quebec. Then suddenly the deal went through as originally planned and the furor seemed to disappear.

Oh, look.

The Harper government is expected to make a major announcement Monday that could see Canada's aerospace industry given $900 million.

Industry Minister Maxime Bernier will make the announcement concerning new research and development initiatives, in Montreal where the majority of the industry in Canada is based.

Those planes are becoming awfully expensive.