May 2007 Archives

Justice Linden's report has been released and may be read on the commission's site here.

The CBC give us a quick summary of the commission's findings here. Note their warning that their report contains language that may offend some readers. On a quick scan, I'd say that they're referring to a word allegedly uttered by the former premier of the province of Ontario, but don't quote me.

Feel free to quote Justice Linden, though:

"After carefully assessing the evidence, it is my view that Michael Harris made the statement," Linden wrote. "I agree with Premier Harris's characterization of the statement … as racist."

Harris's sense of urgency, in contrast to police's "go-slow" approach, "created an atmosphere that narrowed the scope" of potential peaceful resolution to the occupation, Linden said.

"The provincial government could have appointed a mediator or negotiator at any time, but did not," Linden wrote. "The premier could have urged patience, rather than speed."

I will have things to say about the report, but I want to read it closely, which will take some time. I want to see especially the commission's assessment of the testimony of Mike Harris's senior aide Deb Hutton. And I want to read the reactions of those who have waited since September 1995 for our justice system to address seriously the murder of Dudley George.

Look up - way up. I have posted about the full moon a couple of times in the past. This time is a little different.

Those of us living in the western hemisphere will see a blue moon tonight - the second full moon in the month of May. Those living in the eastern hemisphere will get their blue moon in June. That is an even rarer phenomenon because it's a 30 day month and the moon has a 29.5 day cycle meaning that blue moons are more likely to occur in 31 day months. On average there are 41 blue moons a century. You can always try promising your significant other that you will get that job finished by the next blue moon. That gives you, on average, 2 1/2 years.

Experts claim that a blue moon has no more effect on human behaviour than any other full moon. That would be bad enough but who knows - maybe a clove of garlic, a silver bullet and a sharpened stake should be part of this evening's attire (although I have it on good authority that is standard dress for some of the POGGE crew). Of course I won't likely get to see the blue moon because we're working on our 5th inch of rain in the last 10 days.

I did some posts on BSE back when that issue exploded on the Canadian cattle industry. Things have been pretty quiet on that front lately - until this. And I don't even have to comment which is just as well because I don't think I could come up with a comment anyway.

As our cousins to the south celebrate Memorial Day as a semi-religious occasion to worship their fallen, it is an opportune moment for Canadians to reflect on our own fallen soldiers, and how their loss is being used to transform the Canada we have known since the end of the Korean War. In the Tyee, Michael Fellman examines how the Afghanistan mission is being used to change our society from one of peacekeeping into one of growing militarism.

Militarism is seeping into Canadian ideological and institutional life, with highly dangerous short-term and long-term implications. Yet we hear precious little outcry from the public or in the media, and this relative silence only encourages those controlling the levers of power to continue this development.

One can date this departure from Paul Martin's commitment of 2500 soldiers to Afghanistan in 2004. At the time, it was as if no one noted that this deployment was in any way different from Canada's traditional peacekeeper role in various trouble spots around the globe under the auspices of the UN. This time, however, the counter-insurgency role called for front-line troops, fully equipped for war and ready for continuous military action. Peacekeeping this is not.

After Jean Chrétien had refused to send Canadian troops to Iraq, Canada came under intense American pressure to pull its weight in the global "war on terror." Obviously Martin agreed to send 2500 troops to one theatre of military action in part to relieve that many U.S. troops to fight in Iraq. This was an indirect but substantial contribution to the American's Iraq war, contracted in a way that would not alarm Canadian voters.

Fellman notes that the Conservatives under Stephen Harper have been more than happy to use our troops in Afghanistan as a means to whip up patriotic fervor and silence public doubt and debate on one of the most fundamental issues of our times: what should Canada's military role be in the 21st century.

Harper's opinion on this matter is clear. If he were prime minister in 2003, our troops would be fighting and dying in Iraq right now, with no end in sight. That he was able to take the reins of power during the Afghanistan mission gave him the ideal opportunity to emulate the Republican military-worship machine in the United States. Thus he states that you cannot "support the troops" without supporting their mission, and smears political opponents who dare to question the Afghanistan mission.

(Used to be the ultimate, but the ultimate externality these days is massive climate change leading to huge ecological catastrophes)

There always seem to be strong pressures to go to war even though overall it’s obviously very bad for business. And we sort of understand why, we talk about the profits of military contractors and so on, but it’s still hard for me to wrap my mind around, hard to see why the tail would be allowed to wag the dog so vigorously. But I was just thinking about the movie The Corporation, and how they characterized corporations as basically sharklike machines that eat resources and crap out externalities. The point is, a corporation is profitable in good part based on how much of the costs involved in its operations it can dump on the rest of the world. And a corporation is politically influential based on how much money it can spare for messing around with politicians; high and reliable profit margins may be more important to this process than overall size.

Updated: now with bonus brilliant rugby players on the turn.

Now, see here. You want good Friday night blues blogging while the Boss is away, you'll have to send good requests. Ok?

Otherwise, the rest of us are just going to ride a few of our favourite hobby-horses. Here is one of mine.

A bit of background. In 1990 the Scottish national rugby team won what was then the Five Nations rugby union championship (over Ireland, Wales, France, and the dreaded Sassenachs -- ie, England -- Italy has since been added to the union).

At the time, tempers were rising in Scotland over many things. You might remember Mrs Thatcher. The Scots certainly do. Few have done as much for the cause of Scottish independence as did Mrs Thatcher.

In the 1960s a folk group called The Corries had turned a poem that played on Robert Burns's great battle song, "Scots Wha Hae," into a modern anthem, "Flower of Scotland." Slowly over a generation, with no official encouragement at all, young Scots had learned and claimed that song as their own. On the field at Murrayfield in Edinburgh in 1990, as they stood pawing the earth, waiting to get at the English team, every young member of the Scottish national team sang every word as though he meant it -- watch the faces as the camera tracks down the row. It was one of those moments.

The Corrie who wrote the song as we know it now, Roy Williamson, was dying that season. Part way through the video, you will hear his partner, Ronnie Browne, speak of how hard that was at the time. And then you will hear Roy and Ronnie take over from the crowd to sing the song as they passed it on to all Scots, including the Princess Royal, who has often been filmed singing along with gusto. (Lyrics in Scots English and Gaelic on the turn.)

Sound way up. The white cross on blue is the cross of St Andrew. The gold and red flags are the standard of William I of Scotland, William the Lion.

If anyone in this fair land is still under the illusion the Stephen Harper's Conservatives represent any type accountable government, the last few months should have cured them of that misguided notion. Between the lies, corruption, secrecy, bullying and incompetence, the Cons have revealed themselves to be nothing more than Liberals with an ugly George Bush fetish. Lawrence Martin lays out the unravelling of the Conservatives in today's Globe:

It's rare that a week has gone by without evidence of blatant obstructionism, or ministerial misconduct, or political thuggery of some kind. The Conservatives haven't yet stooped to the levels of contamination that the Grits reached in their bad seasons. But give them time.

Last week was symptomatic. At an ethics-committee probe of the Afghan detainee controversy, they tried for hours to block the appearance of witnesses whose testimony could prove embarrassing. They shut down the official languages committee - the same day as the tabling of a report by the Official Languages Commissioner highly critical of their performance.

In the Commons, they typically ran away from pointed questions, choosing instead to "hide behind political rants," as Liberal Ken Dryden put it.

On the cleanliness front, they've been caught up in several conflict-of-interest allegations and, now, just like the Grits, are getting dinged for living the high life at taxpayers' expense.

One of the first to be cited was Heritage Minister Bev Oda. Declining to use a minivan, she racked up $6,000 in limousine expenses in Halifax last year while attending the Juno Awards. In reference to a famous film about a Ms. Daisy, the NDP labelled the affair "Driving Ms. Lazy."

Ms. Oda, who was also caught up in a conflict of interest imbroglio over a fundraiser in her riding, was not alone. Two other cabinet members, International Co-operation Minister Josee Verner and Diane Finley, Minister of Citizenship and Immigration, racked up exorbitant limo expenses. Then the men, Labour Minister Jean-Pierre Blackburn and Transport Minister Lawrence Cannon, jumped on board. Only this time, it was airplanes - government-jet joy rides, allegedly without disclosing the trips as required by government regulations.

As chief example-setter for team transparency, Prime Minister Harper has his own woes. He has steadfastly refused to disclose the campaign donors for his 2002 Alliance Party leadership run. His party initially failed to report more than $530,000 in donations for their 2005 convention. He once raised a storm over Reform Party leader Preston Manning's failure to disclose his sizable clothing allowance. Now, Mr. Harper refuses to reveal how much he spends on a personal image adviser he frequently takes around with him.

The PM appointed a separatist to investigate polling commissioned by the previous Liberal government. But it was then revealed that he failed to disclose his own department's public-opinion research in ethnic communities last year. In what looked to be a positive move in reducing patronage, he created a public appointments commission, but abolished it when his nominee to head it was rejected.

Often accused of running a one-man government that barricades the doors, Mr. Harper ran into heavy criticism for initially refusing to allow media coverage of fallen soldiers returning from Afghanistan. Former information commissioner John Reid then charged that the Prime Minister did a complete about-face on his promises of openness, saying his planned changes to the Access to Information Act were retrograde and dangerous. The words seemed harsh, but journalists probing, for example, the Afghan detainee question have found that released documents are censored to an extraordinary degree.

We are having a slight problem with comments seeming to take forever to upload. We have encountered this before but I don't know what the cause is and with Da Boss still on "vacation" [he's gonna hate me for that one ;-) ] we may have to put up with it for awhile. Give your comments some time before re posting and if you wind up with multiple posts of the same comment, we will delete the duplicates. Sorry for the inconvenience.

Today is provincial election day in Manitoba. If you didn't know that, it's not a surprise - it hasn't exactly been a barn burner of a campaign. This tilt pits Gary Doer's Dinos (Dippers in name only) against the Conservatives led by Hugh McFadyen - arguably the most pathetic party leader in Canada since Stockwell Day took off his wetsuit. The perennial also ran Liberals led by the recently embalmed Jon Gerrard are also present.

Doer's government has been characterized by nuthin' in particular. After two terms, I doubt most Manitobans can list five accomplishments of his government. On the plus side, they can't list five screw ups either.

With Da Boss away, it seems like the duty of keeping the tradition alive fell to me. Unfortunately, I'm not much of a blues fan, so instead I decided to present you all with a video that sums up everything I learned getting my History degree...

The injury to our pogge following Steve Gilliard's medical problems is an in your face demonstration of just how transient and fragile our lives are. All of us (especially at my age) would love to think we're good for at least another twenty years. The truth is that twenty minutes is just as real a possibility. We're all leaving here one to a box.... and sooner than we would like.

I spent a very cheerful and talky hour and a half yesterday afternoon with the Boss, who wanted all his friends to settle down and cheer up and get back to work and behave themselves -- y'know, the way that he always does.

Given that he has sustained multiple serious injuries, some that are healing themselves relatively quickly, others that are going to take some rehab, and given that he was inches (or less) away from much much worse, our pogge is looking and sounding remarkably normally poggish. He is cheerful and animated and interested, and a good way towards being fully mobile again, although we're probably thinking a couple of months there. He was tickled to read all the get-well messages from this site and from the fluwiki, where he is one of the anchors.

For almost two days, no one close to pogge knew where he was. He has been thinking about that, all on his own, and he wanted to talk about it. No particularly deep conclusions emerged, just a sense of pleasure at knowing that so many friends are now back in touch.

And you never know. Within a week or so, the pogge posts could reappear at any time. You've been warned.

I’ve just been reading about struggles in Bolivia—Cocaleros, miners, water privatization, gas nationalization, and in the end the overthrow of the neoliberal governments. We’ll see how things work out, but the point for me is that the big achievements happened because there were existing community-level social structures that were used to getting things done, and they organized horizontally in a big way when the going got tough. In the city of El Alto, all the poor neighbourhoods had associations that fought for local things like getting power hooked up or getting a road paved. The miners had strong unions that had fought hard in the past. The cocalero associations were newer, but often the nucleus from them seems to have come from displaced miners with a tradition of organizing, as well as from the situation getting so bad that they knew they *had* to do something.

This is nothing new, really. It’s a cliché that if you want an effective left what you really need is grassroots organization and mobilization. People talk about it all the time. But Canada is, quite frankly, not a country with a whole lot of community happening, and this is sort of halfway by design.

Hi.

You may not remember me, but I used to play a blogger on the Internet, but then I quit. Now I have done that before, but then I unquit, and then quit again. Then I unquit to join POGGE, but then I quit that too. Now I am unquitting again. As you might guess, I have issues.

By now, most of you have heard about pogge's mishap. I thought I would step out of blogging retirement for a little while and help keep things going around here until he feels ready to step back into the fray. As you will soon realize, this is a downward trade for the readers of this site, but since we're providing this service for free, I'm worth every penny you're paying.

Now that's not to say things have been lacking since I left Peace, Order and Good Government some six months ago. Frankly, I have been an avid reader of this blog during my absence, and it has only gotten better since my departure. (Hmmmm...I'm not making much of a case for my return...)

I certainly can't replace pogge in any meaningful way, but I can contribute in my own fashion to the commentary already provided by your most excellent regulars. As you can see in the post below, skdadl has done a fine job carrying on with pogge's tradition of Friday night blues blogging, so we're doing what we can to minimize the Big Guy's absence. I know we won't be able to mitigate it entirely, because, let's face it, only pogge is pogge.

And by the way, thanks to everyone for your kind words for the boss man. Mahigan is planning to print them out for him, so he will be getting your messages. Your sincere response has reminded me just how much I missed being part of the online progressive community in this country. You're fine folks, and I look forward to chatting with you once again in the comments.

Update: Spelling in title corrected thanks to a certain roguish smurf. So far, you guys are getting your money's worth.

We can't know what pogge would have played for you tonight, but we know that he likes Billie.

Here she is in 1957, "Fine and Mellow," in a special session that pogge admires, with Coleman Hawkins, Lester Young, Ben Webster, Gerry Mulligan, Vic Dickenson, and Roy Eldridge.

And the bonus: Billie sings to Our Man:

Seniority is supposed to have its benefits - this isn't one of them. This is just a short post to let you know that our widely esteemed and generally fearless leader, His Poggeness, has been injured in an accident and is currently cooling his heels (along with the rest of him) in hospital. His injuries, as they say on the news, are serious but not life threatening. We do not have anything definitive yet but, based on our current information, it appears that his enforced period of R & R will be measured in weeks rather than days.

Obviously we are taken aback by this turn of events. After all, these things are supposed to happen to total strangers you hear about on television not to people with whom you are involved. We, his loyal underlings, will endeavour to keep the doors open and the lights on in his absence. (I believe this is vaguely related to the concept of "the inmates taking over the asylum".) We expect there to be some bumps in the process given that the back end of this operation has largely been a one man show. We ask for - and appreciate - your cooperation while we muddle through in the interim.

There may be some additional information later today and we will update if needed.

Posting something relevant to Canada, for a change.
Apparently, people from the Tyendinaga reserve in Ontario are finding themselves forced to get militant about a land dispute. Why? Well, sure, there’s a negotiation process happening, which would doubtless yield results some year or decade. But by then, the land itself would be literally gone:

The reason Mr. Brant isn’t willing to let the negotiations take their course is that these talks are designed to take decades. And as the time passes, the land disappears. . . . At the gravel quarry near Deseronto, the loss of land is painfully, insultingly literal. The quarry is on land never ceded by the Mohawks of the Bay of Quinte, a fact the federal government has acknowledged. The only question is what form compensation for the theft will take. The Tyendinaga band council and Ottawa have been negotiating over that question since last November. The problem arose because, as the two parties talked, trucks were carrying 10,000 loads of newly crushed gravel out of the pit every year - an estimated 100,000 tonnes. While they bargained for the land, the land itself was disappearing.

The first installment of blues blogging featured Stevie Ray Vaughan in an unplugged version of Pride and Joy (video no longer available, which sucks). Here's his plugged version.

And bearing absolutely no relation to the above whatsoever: Phone Booth by the Robert Cray Band.

Apparently it’s become expected that I will drone about Anarchism. Well, not to disappoint people, I’ll hold forth a moment. But you might be surprised what I would consider to apply. Far as I’m concerned, Anarchism is really just about participatory democracy taken as broadly as remotely plausible, applied to everything, including economic activity. Don’t really understand why we insist religiously on democracy in politics, but then as soon as we go in to work we’re fine with autocratic pyramids showcasing most of the deficiencies of feudalism but none of the advantages.
So any place where the democracy’s getting a lot more participatory is of interest—and where else would we expect such things to be happening than Venezuela? So without further ado, let’s see what Julio Chavez (no relation to Hugo) has been doing in the town of Carora:

The former mayor made all of the decisions for municipal expenditures, and awarded lucrative municipal contracts to his friends and family. Like most other governments of the 4th Republic, they had virtually ignored the social problems facing the majority of citizens in the municipality. Most of these businesses and individuals had never paid taxes – that is, until Chavez arrived on the scene. In just two short years, the municipal government has quadrupled its operational tax base by collecting taxes from errant companies . . . What is remarkable is that Chavez has turned these funds over to the communities to decide how they are spent. But the buck doesn’t stop there, the citizens are also active in the administration of public funds, including comptrollership and evaluation. Julio Chavez began his term by quickly implementing all of the participatory programs outlined in the country’s constitution, including the participatory budget, the local public planning councils, and most recently, the communal councils.

OTTAWA– Canadian troops in Kandahar were so disturbed by the beating of a prisoner they had just transferred to the Afghan police force that they demanded to have the man returned to their care, a top soldier says in a sworn affidavit.

The testimony of Col. Steve Noonan, a former senior commander on the Afghan mission, casts doubt on the claims of Prime Minister Stephen Harper and senior ministers that they had no specific reports of abuse of prisoners in Afghanistan.

Thanks to jeff at where'd that bug go?, who also provides a handy summary of our prime minister's recent considered responses to those Canadian citizens who might have been worried about violations of international law (never mind human decency) committed in our name and brushed aside by three consecutive governments, two of them Liberal (unfortunately but undeniably), and one seriously foul-mouthed and insubordinate CDS.

Colonel Noonan is probably wishing right now that the Star story wasn't about him --

Noonan gave his sworn statement this week as part of the government's response to legal proceedings launched by human rights advocates. But in attempting to show how the Canadian Forces use discretion in the handling of detainees he appears to have given ammunition to critics of the government's policy.

-- but sorry, Colonel Noonan: you're a hero of democracy now whether you want to be or not.

Meanwhile, government lawyers fending off a lawyer for Amnesty International, which is challenging government policy towards detainees in Federal Court, revealed that they had done at least a little time in one of Karl Rove's summer camps:

Questions to Noonan on Wednesday about the date of the incident, even the medical condition of the prisoner, were blocked by justice department lawyer Sanderson Graham.

"When did that incident occur?" asked Paul Champ, the Amnesty lawyer.

"We object to that question," Graham replied.

"On what basis?"

"On the basis of national security," Graham said.

"It threatens Canada's national security to know when the Canadian Forces observed local Afghan National Police beating a detainee that they transferred to that unit?" Champ said.

"We object to any questions on this incident generally," Graham replied.

The whole neo-con house of cards is collapsing in Washington, and Stephen Harper wants to preserve it in aspic here? Why?

Stephen Harper, his bizarre ministers, and that foul-mouthed insubordinate CDS who hates democracy persist in pretending that there is a battlefield and there is an enemy, even though they are clearly misidentifying both, maybe because they are stupid, maybe because they are lying to us under pressure.

By now, who cares which or why?

We owe Afghanistan, but the first thing we owe Afghanistan is an end to this misguided combat mission.