Peace, order and good government, eh?

Who are you and what have you done with Thomas Friedman?

Thomas Friedman's New York Times columns have been behind the subscriber wall for some time (a fact for which I'm usually grateful). Sean-Paul Kelley has excerpts from today's column and I have to admit to being a bit blown away. It may be the surest sign yet that even if the Bush administration is bent on confrontation with Iran, significant portions of the media might do a bit more than stenography this time around.

The jig's up

They're on to us. We bloggers have finally been exposed for the disturbed and anti-social individuals we are. Apparently we're terrorists, too. Jim Elve has the details (and a not inconsiderable rebuttal).

Oh this is comforting

The Globe and Mail has a report on yesterday's proceedings of the parliamentary committee following up on the Arar inquiry. The subject of the day was the leaking to the media by anonymous sources that was designed to smear Maher Arar and suggest that he really was a terrorist. And the two primary witnesses were Margaret Bloodworth, national security advisor to the Prime Minister, and William Elliott, associate deputy minister for public safety.

Ms. Bloodworth said she didn't know what more the government could do than let the RCMP investigate. Officials who betray the trust of the government by leaking information will lie about what they did, she added.

Mr. Elliott told the committee that leaking information is a "breach of our fundamental values" within government.

Speaking with reporters later, Mr. Elliott said he thought there was nothing strange about letting the RCMP investigate itself.

"I don't think there is any indication the RCMP were the leakers," Mr. Elliott said.

Wouldn't the whole point of an investigation be to actually determine whether there's "any indication" that the RCMP — or anyone else — was involved? Don't you compromise the investigation at the outset by assuming that the RCMP, who were primary actors in the affair, are innocent and therefore in a position to conduct the investigation? Do we really have senior civil servants who are completely oblivious to the conflict of interest here? Will Justice O'Connor's head explode? Mine might.

Yet Another Infuriating Thing About Patriarchy

So, back in the fifties and sixties and even seventies, the typical model (which had way more exceptions than anyone admitted, but leaving that alone for now) was that you had a husband and a wife, and the husband worked for money and the wife stayed at home and took care of kids, laundry, cooking, and general household maintenance. This was sexist and left women with ridiculously limited lives. OK, and now the model is both spouses and maybe a kid or three work for money and the kids, laundry, cooking and general household maintenance get taken care of (still mostly by the wife, which still ain't fair) in the gaps in between wage labour, commuting and sleeping. During all this, household income remains pretty much stagnant in real terms.

OK, so what happened? Well, a lot of reactionaries claim it's all the women's fault for being feminists and entering the workforce. So in this case, what's wrong with patriarchy on top of all the rest is it acts as a smokescreen for class struggle.

Because what's really going on is that capital has appropriated yet more of our time for the privilege of surviving. If there hadn't been sexism to start with, it would have been flaming obvious—in the fifties and sixties we would have had two spouses each working a two-and-a-half day week as the basic model, gradually increasing to the point where now we have two spouses working a five day week (while at the same time the society's productivity and wealth continued to increase, and the rich got megaricher). Would people have sat still for that? Well, there's some people you can fool all of the time, but I'm betting a lot fewer would have sat still for it than did for what actually happened.

There's an insult-to-injury thing happening too. We have less and less time that isn't working for wages, so what happens? Corporations generously sell us back some of the time they stole from us, with such things as prepackaged, pre-cooked food and fast food restaurants and microwave ovens and energy bars, for-profit day care, cell phones to allow us to do communication at the same time as we do other things like commute. And again, if everyone had been sharing tasks to start with, the arrival of these services as we lost the time to do them properly ourselves would be a ltitle more obvious. Patriarchy helps camouflage it by having the time squeeze happen primarily to one gender and putting anyone who complains in a box and setting them aside—oh, just feminists. It's not just a women's issue, it's a class issue too; take us as households, and we're all getting screwed collectively. Like with racism, sexist discrimination creates a wedge; keeping the women down has operated just like keeping the darkies down, distracting people with fights among ourselves so we'll ignore and be weaker against the oligarchs who keep all the loot. Making the boys think as long as we get to control the women in “our own house”,
we can forget all the buttheads controlling us from higher up. I've always hated that willingness people have to respond to crap from above by dumping crap below, often without realizing or admitting to themselves that that's what they're doing. Even if it weren't craven and morally indefensible, it also is the loser's reaction. No matter what the division, divided we fall. The division of genders is perhaps the worst of all because the tension created is so ubiquitous, the injustice so all-pervasive. Any social justice movement that ignores the justice needed for women is like a sprinter tying up one leg—and, indeed, pausing to re-tie it during the race any time it threatens to come loose.

All quite obvious, no doubt. But it seems these days as if the obvious needs to be restated frequently. I'm not knowledgeable or sophisticated when it comes to feminism, but I don't think I should let that stop me. It seems there are few enough carrying the torch (thank you, skdadl!) that even clumsy efforts are needed.

Just where do you think you're going?

Consider this a companion piece to mahigan's post below.

An Iron Curtain is Descending

"Why are you travelling so often to Canada?" the tough U.S. border guard barked. I was on Amtrak, going from New York to Montreal, as I'd done dozen of times before over several decades. This was my first experience (summer 2006) of the increasingly standard and intrusive "U.S. Exit Interviews" on trains crossing the border. I've been hassled on every train crossing since then, most recently January 2007. The U.S. now has a combined FBI-compiled file of all arrests and charges at all government levels for millions of Americans, and this is instantly viewable by police in many jurisdictions, including border officials of the U.S. and most other countries. In some cities, local police can access this file via one's license plate. The files do NOT show the favorable disposition of arrests that did not lead to charges or of dismissals and findings of innocence. "And what's this entry stamp from Canada, with no country of departure? Was that from Cuba? You know U.S. citizens may not travel to Cuba--you could be imprisoned and fined."

This line of questioning has been part of every exit interview since.

The story contains estimates of the number of Americans who soon may not be able to leave their country at all because they can't get passports -- millions. There's also some info on the economic impacts.

Most media attention about new U.S. travel restrictions has focused on harm to tourism and other business--with considerable protest from border communities about across border trade, and from U.S., Canadian and Mexican travel agencies. A Canadian government website dedicated to international trade, Strategis.Ca, estimates that there has already been an 8% reduction of U.S. visitors to Canada and a 7% reduction of Canadian visitors to the U.S., but that this will rise to 14% or more by the end of 2007 for visitors in both directions. Gay tourism to meccas like Montreal and Vancouver is decidedly down--some say as much as 30%. This would reflect the greater likelihood that gay men and women, like non-whites and the poor, would fall afoul of U.S. laws more frequently due to discrimination.

It's not a pretty picture.

Hat-tip to Melanie by email. I'd wonder if I should publicize that but I suspect it's already too late.

No Comment Required

Bush Directive Increases Sway on Regulation WASHINGTON, Jan. 29 — President Bush has signed a directive that gives the White House much greater control over the rules and policy statements that the government develops to protect public health, safety, the environment, civil rights and privacy.

In an executive order published last week in the Federal Register, Mr. Bush said that each agency must have a regulatory policy office run by a political appointee, to supervise the development of rules and documents providing guidance to regulated industries. The White House will thus have a gatekeeper in each agency to analyze the costs and the benefits of new rules and to make sure the agencies carry out the president’s priorities.

This strengthens the hand of the White House in shaping rules that have, in the past, often been generated by civil servants and scientific experts. It suggests that the administration still has ways to exert its power after the takeover of Congress by the Democrats. Emphasis added.

com·mis·sar (kŏm'ĭ-sär')

1a An official of the Communist Party in charge of political indoctrination and the enforcement of party loyalty.

1b The head of a commissariat in the Soviet Union until 1946.

2. A person who tries to control public opinion.

The Political Leader

The basis of Party organisation is the principle of leadership. The community cannot rule itself, either directly or indirectly. Whoever is best fitted for such a job should be a leader. Such a man will be supported by the confidence of the Folk. All Political Officers are held to have been appointed by the Leader and are answerable to him; towards their subordinates they enjoy full authority. What matters in the selection of Political Officers is to place the right man in the right post. The offices of the Party vary to such a degree that the accurate selection of leaders requires considerable knowledge of human nature as well as long experience. Age and social position are irrelevant, character and aptitude decisive.
by Guess Who

Timing is everything

Feds blasted for delaying NAFTA enviro studies

A spokesman for NAFTA's environmental watchdog has blasted Canada for failing to release two reports that examine Ottawa's alleged failure to enforce its own environmental laws.

But the office of Environment Minister John Baird denies any intention to suppress the reports, and says Canada is working with its NAFTA partners to make them public.
...
Under CEC rules, environment ministers from the three NAFTA countries must vote on release of a report, but in practice it is generally left to the country that is being investigated to release the findings.

Baird's director of communications, Mike van Soelen, said the reports will be released, but could not say when.

"They're complex, lengthy, very thorough documents so it requires all three governments to essentially review them and greenlight them."

We can't hold Baird responsible for this one. Yet. According to the story, these reports are normally released within 60 days while these two have been sitting around for seven months. That means Ambrose sat on them. Because, you know, it's complicated.

So. Just as the Conservatives unveil attack ads designed to discredit Dion's bona fides on environmental issues we learn that they themselves have been sitting on bad news about environmental issues.

Perfect.

Things that may or may not be happening in the UK

I’ve had an odd recurring experience when reading the news from Britain over the last couple of months. The Brits so often seem to be dealing with momentous events (or at least splashier tabloid headlines than Canadians usually get to play with), but then repeatedly, those stories just ... fizzle.

I suppose that happens everywhere to a degree. Perhaps I am oversensitized to the phenomenon in Britain because I have been trailing along behind Tony Blair for so long, convinced over and over again that the latest of his appalling mistakes (and I'm being polite to call them that) is going to sink him for good, but they never do.

Just last Monday, for instance, I awoke to this thrilling headline in the Guardian: “Blair likely to quit if aides charged in loans inquiry.” Omigosh, I thought. It’s the Capone solution – you know, if you can’t get him for his real crimes (like aiding and abetting his good friend George W. Bush in subverting international order and starting a disastrous and criminal war in Iraq, not to mention chipping away at civil liberties at home), then funny business with the accounts will do. It’s the wrong reason (you doubt that honours have been up for sale for some generations?) and thus a bit of a disappointment, but for a day or so I was humming happily along, “oh, you can’t always git what you want, but if you try sometimes, you just might find ...”

But no. Through the week, the story fizzled. On Wednesday, Blair sidestepped a question in the Commons about whether he would indeed resign if a close aide were charged in the cash-for-honours scandal, and then flew off to one of the ego-stroking glam international stages he so loves, the World Economic Forum at Davos, where he gets to make all those high-minded legacy speeches about Africa and climate change and global justice that he has been peddling for several years now to absolutely no detectable effect. (Somalia update to come.)

We needn’t lose all hope. Police investigations of the cash-for-honours scandal continue; a second close aide has been reinterviewed “under caution” this week. As those who remember the magical evening of 21 November 1990 will recall, when British PMs go, they can go very fast. All it takes is a brief visit from the party elders and a quick review of the numbers. Excellent system, eh wot? (But what is taking them so bluidy long?)

And the soft-hearted among us have no need to worry about Tony. Tony will be ok.

The boss of a big private equity business told me last week that he had received an approach from a City grey eminence. "What your firm needs," urged this hopeful hustler, "is a seriously high-profile public figure up front, flying the flag for you. For £4m, we can get you Tony Blair."

I disbelieve 50% of that story. Though I am sure the reported offer was made, Blair would not yet dare to authorise such an explicit advance in his name. But the proposal merely anticipated reality. A few months hence - or sooner if, as the Guardian reported yesterday, cash-for-honours charges against an aide prompt him to stand down early - he will be up there on the block, with an auctioneer demanding: "What am I offered for this dazzling ex-prime minister? Who will start me at £4m?"

Meanwhile, the hard-hearted among us may find consolation in George Galloway’s latest address to the Commons on his own government’s record on Iraq. Be sure to catch his closing condemnation of Blair in person (immediately ruled unparliamentary, of course, which is no doubt why Galloway saved his naming for a very quick ending).

Other kinds of fizzles:

It is fair and proper, no doubt, that criminal investigations of all kinds should go quiet after the first flurry of public attention. No surprise that there is no news yet from Suffolk about the suspect charged in the murder of six Ipswich women – in fact, it is good to know that the only recent news out of Ipswich is the soccer figures.

The investigation into the murder of Alexander Litvinenko, however, resurfaced as a continuing puzzle on Friday, when the Guardian reported that the British government are preparing to demand the extradition of Andrei Lugovoi, a Russian businessman, on suspicion that he is Litvinenko’s mystery poisoner.

The immediate problem with pursuing Lugovoi is that the Russians refuse to do that, on constitutional grounds. Well, maybe they do; maybe they don’t. Maybe they would bend their constitutional guarantees to one of their own citizens for a quid pro quo: Britain would trade Boris Berezovsky, the Russian businessman who has been granted asylum in the UK and who has interesting connections to Litvinenko’s case, which clearly the British cannot and will not do.

Sources in the Russian prosecutor's office denied this yesterday. But pro-Kremlin Russian politicians suggested a quid pro quo in the Litvinenko affair was reasonable, and said they were baffled by Scotland Yard's one-sided demands.

"Currently the British side seems to be considering Lugovoi as main suspect in the case," said Alexei Mitrofanov, leader of the Liberal Democrat party faction, which supports Vladimir Putin, the president.

British officials in Moscow have tried to explain the nature of the judicial system in Britain, and the fact that detectives operate independently of political pressure.

The deeper problem, at least for amateurs following the story of Litvinenko’s murder, is that Lugovoi still looks like only one of a number of possible suspects. For a number of reasons this case looks to be so entangled in internal Russian politics, the international effects of internal Russian politics, internal Italian politics, the international arms trade, and gawd knows what else that it is hard to see it going anywhere very soon.

The trial of the alleged London Tube bombers of 21 July 2005 began two weeks ago. The testimony so far has been gripping – in this case at least, it was the criminals who fizzled in the first place, although they apparently came very close to replicating the horrors of the 7 July bombings, which killed 52 commuters as well as the 4 bombers. (The Guardian site carries almost daily updates of the trial testimony.)

The major criminal failure – much more than a fizzle -- in the investigation of the potential horror of 21 July occurred on 22 July 2005, when British police assaulted and murdered an innocent man, Jean Charles de Menezes, in a Tube station. That story continues as well.

And for our final fizzle: who isn’t happy to hear that the execrable tabloid News of the World has run into more than a spot of bother? Guess how they did that. By violating the law and the privacy of other human beings for no greater purpose than to report to a panting public the condition of a prince’s knee tendon:

Goodman had a glittering reputation at the News of the World for scoop-getting, reputedly holding the paper's record for the highest number of consecutive front-page leads.

But his thirst for inside information led him to break the law by hacking into private phone messages, and today earned him a four-month jail sentence.

Goodman's undoing resulted from the pursuit of comparatively low-grade tittle-tattle. The story that first aroused suspicion in the royal household that he had been tapping into phone messages appeared in the News of the World's Blackadder column on November 6 2005.

It told how Prince William had consulted doctors over a pulled knee tendon and had postponed a mountain rescue course - something known to very few people.

A week later the diary ran an item saying that Tom Bradby, ITV's former royal correspondent, had lent the prince some broadcasting equipment. The piece appeared a week before Bradby was due to meet William.

"We worked out that only he and I and two people incredibly close to him had actually known about it," said Mr Bradby, who is now political editor for ITN.

The royal household reported its suspicions to the police, and the inquiry was taken on by the counter-terrorism branch of Scotland Yard.

Jail time for two smarty-pants hacks. Editor’s resignation accepted. Press Complaints Commission inquiry initiated.

Do you ever wonder about the things that some people do to earn a lot of money in our world?

What Price Freedom?

One of my favourite Canadian columnists is the Star's Walkom. Walkom writes today on the Mahar case and what it tells us about the US, Canada and the Candian government's approach to dealing with "security" concerns. And, frankly, it's a must read, for both Americans and Canadians:

Ottawa's decision to compensate Canadian Maher Arar for its role in his unlawful imprisonment and torture contains a warning and a lesson.

The warning is that Canada and the U.S. are on fundamentally different paths when it comes to matters of terrorism and human rights. The lesson is that until Ottawa gets more aggressive with our friends in the war on terror, a Canadian passport won't mean much.

First the warning. The U.S. has chosen to subordinate the principles of individual freedom to what it sees as its security needs. It jails people indefinitely without charge, utilizes interrogation methods that the United Nations describes as torture, wages illegal wars and commits the very crimes against humanity it once helped to prosecute.

As someone who has been watching America closely for years this strikes me as an entirely accurate view.

But here's what this has done to weaker nations like Canada:

At first, the Canadian government tried to skate by this new troubling reality. It refused to give unqualified support to the U.S. war on Iraq, but participated eagerly in its invasion of Afghanistan.

It passed draconian anti-terror laws but was loath to use them, preferring to hand over Canadian suspects (St. Catharines resident Mohamed Mansour Jabarah being the most notable example) to U.S. authorities to do with as they saw fit.

It didn't raise a peep when the U.S. imprisoned Canadian teenager Omar Khadr in its notorious Guantanamo Bay prison camp.

Finally, as Justice Dennis O'Connor's judicial inquiry concluded, while Canadian authorities didn't have any reason to arrest computer engineer Arar, they happily gave the U.S. information (much of it wrong) that helped convince the Americans to do just that.

The U.S. then promptly sent him to Syria to be tortured.

If it had not been for the chain of events that this unleashed, Canada might still be happily muddling along its inconsistent path.

But the Arar case made the contradictions of post-9/11 Canada-U.S. relations so clear that even Americanophile Stephen Harper has to acknowledge them.

"It has raised concerns," the Prime Minister said yesterday when asked at a news conference if, in light of the Arar matter, his government will be able to trust Washington...

... Ottawa, on the other hand, has concluded that what Canada and the U.S. did to Arar was unjustified – to such an extent that it's willing to compensate him at a cost of more than $10.5 million.

But if we are so far apart on this case, what does this say about Canada-U.S. co-operation in other areas of the so-called war on terror?

What does that say, for instance, about our role in the U.S.-inspired counter-insurgency efforts in Afghanistan? What does that say about our shameful silence on the matter of Khadr, who faces a Guantanamo tribunal so flawed that even American military lawyers have condemned it?

That's the warning.

The lesson is that in the post- 9/11 world Canada must better protect its own citizens – not from our enemies but from our friends.

What does Walkom mean by that? Well, how about other cases...

Canada is doing its usual tiptoeing over the fate of Chinese-born Canadian citizen Huseyin Celil, who was imprisoned while visiting in-laws in Uzbekistan last spring, deported to China and jailed.

China's excuse is that Celil is a terrorist.

When Harper, to his credit, attempted to take a more aggressive line with Beijing, he was roundly pilloried by Canadian business interests for threatening their opportunities in China. So, he quieted down.

More recently, Ottawa has maintained the same kind of no-muss, no-fuss approach in the case of Bashir Makhtal, a Canadian citizen living and working in Somalia.

When the latest civil unrest erupted there last month, Makhtal took the Canadian government's advice and fled Somalia, only to be arrested by Kenyan authorities when he tried to enter that country.

He was jailed and deported – not to Canada, where he is a citizen, but to Somalia where he is not (Makhtal was born in Ethiopia). Indeed, his family fears that Makhtal, whose grandfather was once a secessionist rebel in Ethiopia, has been passed on to that country – where he is unlikely to receive tender treatment.

Our friends the Kenyans apparently think Makhtal was somehow connected to the deposed Islamic government in Somalia, which according to the U.S. government makes him terror-linked.

This, if true, would be interesting but beside the point. If Makhtal is a terrorist, he can be tried here – just as Arar could have been tried here had there been any reason to do so. (There was not.)

I'm going to put it more simply: the US, and governments like Kenya and China, are not respecting Canada's sovereignty. It is particularly pathetic when dealing with a government like that of Kenya's, but it is still reprehensible with respect to the US and China. When Walkom notes that the Canadian government shares information with the US, he's understating the case. US customs agents, for exmaple, have access not just to Canadian criminal records (perhaps understandable) but to Canadian citizens tax records (not acceptable, and none of their business.)

The words "terrorist", "terrorism" and "security" have become meaningless shibboleths used to justify all sorts of abhorent behavior. Label someone a "terrorist" whether there is evidence for it or not (and as Walkom notes, even if there is, that's not relevant) and apparently the requirement to respect human rights and other nation's sovereignty flies out the door.

Enough. If governments like the US want our troops in Afghanistan and our diplomatic cover, of which they get plenty, they should understand that they are required to respect our sovereignty. If they don't they can kiss our dying troops asses goodbye, as they come back to Canada. If we're overseas to fight, if our men and women are dying to help America, then it should in fact be for freedom and human rights - not so that America can kidnap our citizens and torture them or stick them in camps.

The same is true of China. I have long stood up for the Chinese government's right to sovereignty. But sovereignty is a two way street - you get what you give. If China wants us to respect their sovereignty, they must respect ours. Our business interests, like the business interests of every other major nation in the world, may be drooling to participate in the Chinese gold rush, but we have leverage - we are a surplus resource producer and China is not, and there is not enough surplus to go around. It is one thing for China to oppress its own citizens, I dissaprove, but it's their business - it is an entirely other thing for them to oppress ours. And we do have leverage. Moreover the argument from national sovereignty is one that the Chinese are sympathetic to. It should be made, quietly but forcefully, behind the scenes.

As for Kenya and Ethiopia - what? Why are we tiptoeing around these people?

At the end of the day, if sovereignty and human rights are subordinate to business interests - as they apparently are in both the American and Chinese cases, then what are they worth? Nothing.

And if the US is walking down another path - that of torture, prison camps and despotism, Canada is not required to walk that path with her; nor to pretend that China's despotic ways are acceptable.

If there is an economic cost to this, then perhaps it should be put directly to the Canadian people. "Are you willing to give basic civil rights up or lose 10% of your income? Should the Canadian government roll over for despotic governments; give them your information and not bother to agressively try and help you if they decide to lock you up?"

I have enough faith in my fellow Canadians to believe that if the choice were put in such stark terms to them, they would chose to keep their rights, repeal the draconic laws that have been passed and stop "security" cooperation with other nations who refuse to recognize human rights like, oh, a fair trial and the right not to be tortured.

And I have enough faith in the US to think that if Canada puts it in such stark terms, the US will at long last, have enough shame to look in a mirror.

But if I'm wrong about that, then so be it. Because I'm not willing to try and make a trade of freedom and rights for "security" or "prosperity".

That unwillingness is something I used to think was an American value as well as a Canadian one. But if Americans have abandoned it, someone should still hold it high.

I hope that someone will be Canada.

Friday night blues blogging

How Blue Can You Get. Artists too numerous to mention. Even if you don't recognize a face it's probably someone famous.

And a bonus track just 'cos I'm in the mood for it. Eric Clapton and Dr. John. St. James Infirmary

On eggs and baskets

I see I'm not the only one who was prompted by this post from Paul Wells to do a little looking around. Wells wondered out loud whether the sudden resignation of the Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs might be connected to the closure of four Canadian consulates.

At that first link, Lemon Chicken & Lawn Signs has a lengthy quote from the news story on the closures, a story that appears in the Embassy newsweekly but appears to have flown largely under the radar elsewhere. (And perhaps that's because Canada's New Government™ neglected to make any domestic news release on the subject.) Suffice it to say that a lot of people are puzzled and disappointed by a decision ostensibly taken as a cost saving measure.

In a Globe and Mail op-ed Peter Donolo, who was the consul-general in one of the affected consulates in Milan for three years, describes what Canada loses in this bargain.

In Milan, as in Osaka, Fukuoka and St. Petersburg, Canada will lose the expertise and networks it has spent decades building up. It will lose opportunities to attract new business and new investors to our country — the types of opportunities that come only from being on the ground in a business centre, that can only be seized on by entrepreneurial, business-oriented personnel.

And it will lose something else, too.

Call in prestige. Milan has the second-largest consular corps in the world (after New York). By pulling out, Canada hardly comes across as the G7 country it is.

It is this narrowing of ambition that is perhaps the most troubling aspect of these closures.

I could have sworn that this government was concerned about "Canada's place in the world." How does that gibe with abandoning these consulates and losing the institutional expertise that it's taken so long to gain?

Donolo also connects a few dots for us.

It's not coincidental that as we close these consulates overseas, we are expanding our consular network in the United States. More than half a dozen new Canadian consulates have been opened in the U.S. in the past two years alone.

So it begins to look like a calculated decision to focus even more on trade with the U.S. at the expense of trade with other international partners. Which makes no sense to me at all.

Even putting aside the fact that we know the U.S. feels free to ignore its trade agreements when convenient, increasing our reliance on our neighbour to the south just now looks like a bad bet. The Bush administration has left the American economy in tatters and it's difficult to envision a scenario where there won't be a surge of protectionism there. Apparently the lessons of the softwood lumber fiasco really haven't penetrated the brains of those who want Canada to have a strong, independent economy. Or perhaps those who've taken those lessons to heart simply aren't in evidence when policy decisions like this are made.

It's been said that when the U.S sneezes, Canada catches a cold. That hasn't been as much in evidence in recent years but decisions like this seem likely to make us more vulnerable, not less.

So what the heck are they thinking?

Government settles with Arar

Arar to receive multimillion-dollar settlement: CTV

Ottawa will announce a multimillion dollar compensation package for Maher Arar on Friday, CTV News has learned.

The package includes personal compensation of more than $10 million, a $2-million payment for Arar's legal fees, and an official apology, CTV's Ottawa Bureau Chief Robert Fife reported.

"After months of secret negotiations, a dark chapter in Maher Arar's life is finally coming to a close. CTV News has learned a formal legal settlement has been signed with Mr. Arar and his lawyers," he said.

Fife also suggests we might see some fireworks.

"The prime minister, I'm told, is going to come out all guns blazing. He is furious that U.S. ambassador David Wilkins said that Canada had no business telling them to get Mr. Arar off the list," Fife reported.

"His view is that if it was an American who was falsely accused and put on a watch list, they would move heaven and earth to get them off. ... Perhaps he will even offer some legal assistance to Mr. Arar who wants to get his name off the list."

That last part is certainly correct. Were the positions reversed, the Bush administration would do more than insist.

I'll be curious to see what Harper has to say. I've already said that I thought Wilkins made an error in judgement by pushing back the way he did but this isn't exactly what I expected. And Harper does have a temper.

To the immortal memory

Tonight is Burns Night, when Scots and lovers of poetry and liberty pay tribute to Robert Burns (1759-96), bard of his own people and their language and a fierce believer in the brotherhood of all mankind.

If you’re quick about it, you may still be able to bag a wild haggis for your supper tonight; the hunt ends at 3 p.m. GMT. Or perhaps you’re busy scrubbing out your own sheep’s tripe or veal caul right now, preparing to stuff it with some processed haggis parts.

If you’ve been improvident enough to find yourself short of the traditional casings, though, we can help. The finished haggis is, after all, the “great chieftain o’ the puddin’ race” – he’s a savoury steamed pudding, in other words, when he’s not a sort of sausage, and you can whip up a very fine haggis in an old-fashioned pudding bowl.

The only meat in your most basic country haggis is the sheep’s pluck – the liver, lights (lungs), and heart put through a grinder – plus the suet, the fat surrounding the kidneys.

As you’ll see from Meg Dod’s historical recipe for Haggis Royal at the Auld Alliance link, however, by the nineteenth century even Scots were substituting ground mutton for the pluck, and tamer North Americans might want to think of ground lamb. But oh, go on – add a little finely chopped liver for the flavour.

You’ll want about three pounds of ground meat, plus some suet if you can find it, two pounds of steel-cut or pinhead (pinbead) oatmeal (not rolled oats), a couple of onions, chopped, and then follow Mrs Dod’s suggestions for spices, lemon zest, and wine. All great haggii are very peppery, and the mark of the Haggis Royal is those chopped anchovies. For a slightly less rich haggis, perhaps cut back on Mrs Dod’s egg yolks, and you can substitute two to three cups of beef stock for the wine (although why would you want to do that?).

Mix your meats and fats and spices first. Add your oatmeal (lightly toasted in the oven if you like), mix well, and then add the egg yolks if you like and a couple of cups of wine or stock. As soon as the mixture is holding together, you’ve added enough liquid. You don't want it too wet if you mean to unmould it, but you don't want it still crumbly either.

Prepare your kettle and pudding bowl by putting a trivet (or a steamer insert) in the bottom of a kettle large enough to hold your bowl with a 2-inch space all around, and grease the bowl. Fill the bowl with the haggis mixture no more than two-thirds full, and cover with waxed paper or foil securely closed and tied. Add boiling water to the kettle, less than halfway up the bowl, cover, and steam (keep the water on simmer) for about three hours, watching the level of the water. (Yes: depending on the size of your pudding bowl, you may have two haggii here.)

Some there are who like their haggis with a little whisky mayonnaise. Me, I like chutney with my haggis. There is a certain stodge factor in this supper, so the sweet bite of a slice of mango lightens things a bit, and besides it seems such a perfect complement to the pepper of the haggis.

Then, of course, you’ll want your neeps and tatties (turnips and potatoes – we’re not talking Versailles here, and it is deepest winter in rural Scotland), and ideally a generous dish of syllabub to finish your supper off. Well: finish off – that would probably be better said of the wee drams of the modest single malt you’ll be sipping through the occasion.

Much as the evening is traditionally a tribute to the heroic puddin’ of the people, attended with skirling pipes and flourished daggers, no true lover of Burns ever forgets that the brotherhood of all mankind for Burns definitely included the lasses, oh:

For you so grave you sneer at this
You're no but senseless asses oh
The wisest man the world e'er saw
Dearly loved the lassies oh

Green grow the rashes oh
Green grow the rashes oh
The sweetest hours that e're I spent
Were spent among the lassies oh

Some of the saddest hours too, of course. In one short stanza of “Ae Fond Kiss” Burns wrote as simply and purely of the pain of lost love as seems possible:

Had we never lov'd sae kindly,
Had we never lov'd sae blindly,
Never kissed or never parted
We had ne'er been broken-hearted.

So here’s to the wily haggis and to all the lads and lasses who address him tonight, and here’s to the bard who honoured him and us all. To the immortal memory!

Is there for honest poverty
That hings his heed, an a' that?
The coward slave, we pass him by -
We dare be poor for a that!
For a' that, an a' that!
Our toils obscure, an a' that,
The rank is but the guinea stamp,
The man's the gowd for a' that.

...

Then let us pray that come it may
(As come it will for a' that),
That Sense and Worth o'er a' the earth,
Shall bear the gree an a' that.
For a' that, an a' that,
It's coming yet for a' that,
That man to man, the world, o'er
Shall brithers be for a' that.

– “A Man’s a Man for A’ That (1795)

Feeling the heat, Mr. Wilkins?

Wilkins slams Day for questioning U.S. on Arar

U.S. Ambassador David Wilkins on Wednesday criticized Ottawa's efforts to have Maher Arar removed from a United States security watch list, saying the U.S. alone will decide who to let into the country.

Speaking in Edmonton after meeting with new Alberta Premier Ed Stelmach, Wilkins warned Public Safety Minister Stockwell Day to back off, because a U.S. review determined Arar should remain on the watch list.

Yeah, Stock. What's the matter with you? Government officials have no business standing up on behalf of citizens who have already paid for crimes they didn't commit and who have been cleared of any suspicion of wrongdoing by a public inquiry. Don't you know 9/11 changed everything?

I must have missed the part where Day actually threatened some kind of retaliation if the Bush administration didn't bend to his will.

Look, the American position is easy to explain. If they relent and take Arar off their watch list it's as good as an admission that there was no good reason for him to be on it in the first place. The fact that we now know about the RCMP's mistakes doesn't let the Americans off the hook because they've always claimed to have their own reasons for targetting Arar and because they still have to explain sending him to Syria to have the crap beaten out of him rather than sending him back to Canada. And since I'm not sure Arar has exhausted all the possibilities in his attempts to sue the American government, any move to acknowledge Arar's innocence on their part could cause them legal problems.

But Wilkins just made a mistake. One thing the Conservatives do have going for them is the perception that they have a better relationship with our neighbour and trading partner than the Liberals ever did. For Wilkins to pop off in public and act like he's been studying at the Paul Cellucci School of Diplomacy threatens that. Any public behaviour on his part that looks remotely like bullying a Canadian government that's trying to at least appear as though it's defending one of its citizens is likely to make a lot of Canadians wonder if they shouldn't vote for the other guys the next time they have the chance. If the American government is going to get all belligerent in our faces, we may as well assume that as the default position and not be concerned about so-called anti-Americanism on the part of our politicians. Wilkins should have played the issue down or ignored it completely.

But then the Bush administration hasn't been noted for appointing people with the ability to think very far ahead.

SOTU aftermath

So who else thinks we might see a Draft Jim Webb movement? (If you'd rather watch than read, there's a YouTube video of the speech.) Ian Welsh has an interesting post on Webb.

I'm not a feminist, but ...

Actually, I am a feminist, and there have never been any ifs ands or buts about that. Back in my day (stop yawning) we were fighting for women's liberation, and it would be at least twenty years before I would start to pay attention to those strange confessions from younger women that always began as my title does: "I'm not a feminist, but ... "

Today our sisters in the U.S. are celebrating the 34th anniversary of Roe v. Wade by blogging for choice, and asking us all to speak out about why we support women's right to choose.

It frustrates me that we should still be doing this -- I have to admit that. I absolutely support this campaign, but I chewed nails at having to write to it. If American women were truly free to celebrate Roe v. Wade and Canadian women to breathe freely after the last Morgentaler decision (1988), we might be raising a glass or two or throwing something healthful on the barbie today, but we wouldn't still be blogging and writing and arguing our hearts out for choice.

Why do I support women's right to reproductive choice, aka women's autonomy, apart from the fact that I have really strong feelings about my own, y'know, existence?

Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms ...

2. Everyone has the following fundamental freedoms:

a) freedom of conscience and religion;
b) freedom of thought, belief, opinion and expression, including freedom of the press and other media of communication;
c) freedom of peaceful assembly; and
d) freedom of association.

...

7. Everyone has the right to life, liberty and security of the person and the right not to be deprived thereof except in accordance with the principles of fundamental justice.

I am a democrat -- that's lower-case d, as in a profound believer in the shortlist of necessary principles and structures that we must defend and have still to realize just about everywhere.

In my reading of democracy, there is one thing above all that we never ever do to one another, and that is to muck about in one another's minds. There is a reason that freedom of conscience is always the first substantial article of every great democratic Bill or Declaration or Charter, and that is that our consciences often conflict. When they do, unless they have negotiated a public peace among themselves (aka democracy), one or another form of moralizing conscience will inevitably strive to destroy all the others.

The public peace of democracy requires nothing short of the unqualified legal guarantee of women's autonomy, which entails every woman's unqualified right to reproductive choice. Women are not citizens without the right to self-determination; as Rox Populi says, "If I had no right to self-determination, I'd be a slave."

The open assault on women's right to choose comes from predictable quarters and would be easy to defeat with rational arguments if only it were not backed by so many with so much institutional and state power.

But it gets worse. First in the U.S. and now in Canada, many supposed liberals have been spooked enough by populist paranoia to begin to pander to its taste for melodrama. Hillary Clinton obviously believes that she has to fuzz the boundaries between the public peace and private conscience by characterizing abortion as a tragic choice, a necessary evil, an always pathetic choice made by victims in need of harm-reduction counselling from superior persons ... such as her. Sad enough that mainstream American Democrats are stuck in that fearful mindset, afraid of so many of their own people, willing to sell out almost any principle in order to get elected. (So, remind me: why do we elect such people?) Sadder still that anyone should attempt to import the same anti-democratic melodrama to Canada, as Elizabeth May of the Green Party has done.

How can we say it more clearly? Any sentimentalizing qualification of the full and independent autonomy of every living woman is an assault on democracy. Why are so many so obsessed with women's freedom to choose? So fearful? How stupid or selfish are women assumed to be? How incapable of rational choice? How different from the majority of men, who have always been as free to be as mediocre and often as irrational as they liked?

Why am I pro-choice? I'm alive.

I was approaching middle age when I became one of the "everyone"s of the Charter guarantees. Contraception -- even advice about contraception -- was semi-illegal well into my adulthood, and open discrimination against me on many fronts was perfectly legal. I know women of my generation who were shamed into compulsory pregnancy and then forced to give up their babies for adoption, who have lived ever since with a sadness that no patronizing patriarch or matriarch will ever know.

Women. We're here. Get used to it.

Swiftboaters, start your engines

Now that Hillary Clinton has officially announced her entry into the race for the Democratic presidential nomination, you can be assured of more news like this.

Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-N.Y., may have just officially announced the start of her presidential run today, but already conservatives are planning a "documentary" that they suggest will expose new wrinkles to the former first lady's personal and political story.

Dave Bossie, president of conservative non profit Citizens United, and Dick Morris, a political writer who has recently been critical of the Clintons, are working on the film, Bossie told ABC News Saturday.

The pair hopes to release the project sometime this fall, and Bossie, the film's executive producer, said it will present Clinton's story in a "unique and interesting way."

Unique and interesting, eh? I'll bet. There's a little background on Bossie that didn't make it into that ABC News story.

From Wikipedia:

He was chief investigator for the Whitewater hearings held by U. S. Senator Lauch Faircloth, and was an investigator for Representative Dan Burton (R-IN), the chairman of the House investigation into alleged Clinton campaign finance abuses.

He has been sharply criticized by both Democrats and Republicans. James Carville said of him, "he made collective fools out of about 80 percent of the national press corps." President George Bush urged citizens not to support his campaigns, saying, "We will do whatever we can to stop any filthy campaign tactics" in a newsletter to 85,000 Republican contributors. Bush also filed a complaint with the Federal Elections Commission regarding one TV advertisement.

In early May of 1998, Bossie was fired for selectively editing and releasing to media the transcripts of prison conversations of former Clinton administration official Webster Hubbell that created the impression that Hillary Clinton was involved in billing irregularities at the Rose Law Firm where she and Hubbell both worked.

Bossie is being cagey on the actual release date of the film. From the original link:

The timing of the film's release, which could be as early as September or October, "will depend on the dynamics of the political scene," Bossie said.

Translation: we'll time the release so that our slime will do as damage as possible.

It's going to be a long two years for those who follow American politics.

Ah, Venezuela

I like reading about Venezuela, so I think I'll start blogging about Venezuela. Here's the thing—as a progressive, and indeed a wild-eyed radical, every time I look around things are getting worse. Corporations are tightening their hold on everything. Right wing governments are doing amazingly destructive things. The environment is dying, the rich are getting richer, everyone else is getting poorer or less secure or generally run more intensely through the maze; culture is getting more debased and superficial. Bush keeps looking like he's stupid enough to really bomb Iran, and while I could gloat that that probably will really put the cap on the American empire, I have no confidence that their self-destruction will do anyone else any good, and what comes out of the rubble after the US economy crumbles could be fascism as likely as anything. Oil prices will skyrocket, but Canada probably won't use that money for anything useful, or indeed keep much of it.

When I start getting depressed like that, there's really just one place to turn—Venezuela.

Sure, Venezuela isn't perfect. But compared to everywhere else—man, I'm not gonna pick a lot of nits. In Venezuela the poor are getting less poor, they're getting health care, they're getting education, they're forming co-operatives, they're doing participatory local government, campesinos are taking back land, infrastructure is being built (subways, rail lines, hospitals, bridges, cablecar things to go up the steep slopes to the barrios), workers are taking over factories or starting their own, co-operative local media is being enabled, Chavez is forming ties with other countries in South America and may yet bust the Monroe Doctrine, the economy is going like gangbusters, the armed forces are on side so the coup ain't-a-gonna happen. And it's not standing still. It's an amazing one-two punch; Chavez is a keen strategist and a tough-as-nails politician—he knows how to target key areas to strengthen the revolution and weaken its opponents, has an amazing talent at giving them opponents enough rope to hang themselves only to yank at just the right moment, and he never backs down like all our gutless centre-left politicians do. That's fairly obvious, people talk about Chavez all the time—but the less obvious part is that the people have taken the process into their own hands and are delivering the other punch every day as they organize, learn, produce, take control. Which brings me to the article I thought I'd link to. The first part talks about the campesinos' struggle, the second part is an interview with a campesino in a co-operative taking back land:

Venezuela’s Land Reform: A Participant’s Perspective

Miguel Basabe: . . . Each one of the directors has a specific responsibility and each one completes his/her commitment. This has been a very important factor for us because it has permitted us to increase the level of commitment from every compañero, so that every compañero takes up a protagonistic role and is a principal actor, not a secondary actor. This, inside campesino organizations and cooperatives is fundamental – that every associate understands that apart from being an associate of the cooperative, they play a leading role, a protagonistic role.

Friday night blues blogging

Eric Clapton. Complete with horn section. Have You Ever Loved A Woman.

We're entitled to our entitlements

When I posted recently to question the wisdom of a series of single source contracts for military equipment, I ended up with a fairly lively debate in comments in which many defended the practice. The argument was that years of neglect had created a situation where the replacement of equipment that was at or near the end of its life cycle had made these procurements urgent and that justified taking short cuts in the process. It's a reasonable enough argument but it doesn't really deflect criticism of Canada's New Looking More And More Like Every Other Government™ if the matter isn't actually treated with a sense of urgency.

The delivery of Canada's first military cargo aircraft faces delays while Boeing is embroiled in a backroom battle with Public Works Minister Michael Fortier over Quebec's share of economic benefits flowing from the $3.4-billion purchase.

The negotiations, which were scheduled to close last month, are running into overtime and jeopardizing the plan to deliver the first of four C-17 aircraft to the Canadian Forces in June.

To obtain the contract, U.S.-based Boeing Co. has to pledge to buy supplies and services worth the exact value of the purchase in Canada. This package of regional benefits can be spent directly to build or maintain the Boeing C-17s, or any other current and future Boeing aircraft.

With billions at stake, Boeing is facing political pressure to invest heavily in Quebec, where 55 per cent to 60 per cent of Canada's aerospace industry is located.

But the company plans to spend only 30 per cent of the economic benefits in the politically sensitive province, while directing the rest to other provinces, industry and government sources said.

The story suggests that Fortier has even flirted with scuttling the deal if he doesn't get what he wants which is essentially more pork for the province where he hopes to get re-elected the next time we go to the polls. It's difficult to justify short-circuiting the normal process in a way that could well increase the cost if you're then going to hold up the deal squabbling over who gets the biggest piece of the pie.

My initial skepticism was only partly due to the people who happen to be governing us at the moment and I'd have been asking questions if this was a Liberal government too. But beyond having to wonder if governments are playing games lies a deep distrust of defense contractors who seem all too eager to line up for their share of the taxpayer's money as if it's their due. Lest you think that attitude is confined to American companies, behold:

Sue Dabrowski, general manager of the Quebec Aerospace Association, said her members have high expectations in terms of regional benefits.

"In Quebec, we have 60 per cent of the market. We want 60 per cent of the economic benefits," she said.

Dear Ms Dabrowski,

The 30 per cent you're already getting isn't something you earned. It's a gift the government negotiated for you and dropped into your lap. If this deal is going down as it is because there's an urgent need to ensure that young Canadian men and women aren't being sent into harm's way with equipment that's inadequate or faulty, then perhaps you should take what you're getting, sit down and STFU.

Feel free to pass that message along to the good senator.

Love,
pogge

And believe it or not, this post isn't intended to throw it back in the face of the commenters from that previous thread. I expect they're no more impressed with this circus than I am.

Truly madly deeply

If only ...

If only he would just walk in the door again one day, as though nothing had ever happened.

Or he could just ... materialize. If you’ve seen the movie, you know what I mean. I used to be afraid of ghosts but I’m not any more. He could walk through a wall and sneak up behind me and say “Boo!” and I’d jump, maybe even start to tell him off for leaving in the first place – “What the hell did you think you were doing, dying on us like that?” – but then we’d laugh ourselves silly and put on some of the auld songs and sing ourselves to sleep as the ancestors snuck back in too, to take up annoying residence in the guest room.

I hadn’t seen the movie until midway through this past year, when a wise friend nudged me towards it. Except for the happy ending, I loved it hard enough to wish it could come true. But it hasn’t. My ghost hasn’t come back, no matter how often I’ve invited him. I suppose I should stop troubling him before he and the other spirits who have gone before become exasperated and charge me with stalking.

He was so much to lose, though.

A year ago today it was over for him forever. He brought so much life to others. That was his life, animating others, drawing out the best in all sorts of different people and then showing them how to make their best live in the world. Until very late, just watching other people, how different they all are, we all are, one from another, was a source of purest joy to him. If I think to reach for it, the memory of the beautiful smile he had for life itself is right there. It was so much to lose.

If only he would just walk in the door again one day, as though nothing had ever happened ...

Pension envy

Group warns private sector workers retire later

Private sector workers have to retire later -- and get less expensive benefits -- than civil servants and other public employees, the Canadian Federation of Independent Business has warned.
...
The proportion of early retirees within the public sector was around 56 per cent in 2005, while in the private sector it was just over 33 per cent. For self-employed workers, only 20 per cent were able to take early retirement.
...
The CFIB says one of the key reasons for the disparity between public and private sector workers is a growing disparity between the types of pension plans being offered in both sectors.

While the private sector has been moving toward defined contribution plans, the public sector has stayed with defined benefit plans, which are generally considered more generous for employees.

"In researching this issue, it became obvious that those of us who work in the private sector will not have the same means to retire as our counterparts in the public sector," CFIB president Catherine Swift said in a statement.

I'm pretty sure that those public sector pension plans are part of collective bargaining agreements and won't be changing any time soon. Gee, you don't think this might really be about public sector unions, do you?

One might have thought this would provide Swift with an opportunity to question whether the move towards defined contribution plans in the private sector is such a hot idea. After all, and as we've all just finished reviewing during the minimum wage debate, corporations have been doing quite well these past few years and senior management of large corporations have done particularly well. But Swift doesn't mention that last part. Instead she figures that if there's a disparity, then public sector workers need to get knocked down a peg or two.

"And to add insult to injury, we are subsidizing their retirement lifestyles."

And that would be the line that prompted me to post on this. Now it's their retirement lifestyles. One has visions of all those former civil servants retiring to their mansions in Rosedale to sit by their private pools every evening after spending their days at private golf clubs.

We've seen this movie before. While the really rich get really richer, set the peons against each other. So cry me a river, Catherine. If you're worried about your own retirement perhaps you ought to talk to your employer.

And for the record: I'm one of those self-employed types and no, I don't expect to retire early. I also don't have to show up at the office every day, I don't commute and when I really want a day off, all things being equal, I take it. (I can also stop working and throw up a blog post in the middle of the afternoon without worrying about someone looking over my shoulder but I didn't know I'd be doing this when I went out on my own.)

Oops, indeed

To follow up on this post regarding some rather unfortunate remarks by a Bush administration official, there's been a bit of a reaction.

A senior Pentagon official should be fired for suggesting a boycott of American law firms defending detainees at the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, four law organizations said in a letter to President Bush on Tuesday.
...
Stimson's remarks were aimed at "chilling the willingness" of lawyers to represent Guantanamo detainees and were contrary to the "bedrock principles" of the right to counsel and the presumption on innocence, read the letter signed by the American Association of Jurists, the International Association of Democratic Lawyers, the National Lawyers Guild and the Society of American Law Teachers.

"The threats by Mr. Stimson are not subtle. They imply these pro bono lawyers are terrorists," the letter read. "The administration must not only disavow these remarks, but Mr. Stimson should be publicly admonished and relieved of his duties for making these allegations and threats."

Stimson was not immediately available for comment.

Actually Stimson has commented. He's issued an apology in the form of a letter to the Washington Post.

Here's hoping that no one is willing to settle for that.

Hat-tip to TPMmuckraker.

Carbon trading: a carbon tax, blindfolded and handcuffed, with its shoelaces tied together

A short time ago, I promised (threatened?) that I'd bring up an article about carbon trading.
Where the Lipow article about carbon taxes was ambiguous, his article about carbon trading is, well, I'll let it speak for itself because it's just too funny.

"Mommy, where do carbon offsets come from?"

"Well, you see sweetheart, when a major polluter and a consultant love money very, very much, they express that love in a special way. Nine months later, the consultant produces an extremely large paper packet."

The article's here by the way.

Here's some more, in snippets and chunks:

In theory, carbon taxes and carbon trading yield similar results.(Carbon taxes raise the price of fossil fuels by taxing it. Permits raise the price of fossil fuels by requiring people to buy permits for each unit burned) So why do so many people who support carbon taxes oppose carbon trading? Because in practice they differ catastrophically, something we have good reasons to expect.

The real world record of carbon trading includes:

Extensive use of sequestration offsets.

No one really know how much carbon is sequestered by planting cheap, fast-growing trees in carbon plantations. We do know that a great deal of it is absorbed by soil, which may release greenhouse gases as temperatures rise. We know that tilling such plantations releases old carbon imbedded in soil structure. We know that stable ecosystems upon which local inhabitants depend are often declared degraded lands and replaced by such carbon plantations. We know machinery, fertilizers, and pesticides for such plantations consume fossil fuel energy. We know carbon fixation rates vary tremendously within the same species of plant, depending on micro-climate, soil, pests, and other variables, so we don't know the difference between these plantations and whatever they displace. And we know carbon plantations are often victim of forest fires or other ways of ending plant lifespan -- including harvesting once credit for the sequestration has been sufficiently laundered. So not only is forestry based carbon sequestration highly uncertain, there is good reason to believe in many cases it is a net emitter.

Project-based credits in nations without national emission limits.

Since there is no objective baseline against which to measure emission reductions, the credit is granted based on a consultant's assertion that life without a certain investment will pollute more than life with it. The jargon for this is "additionality" -- saving more carbon than a business-as-usual scenario.

As you can imagine, this opens creative vistas. For example, a widely hated pig-iron manufacturer in Minas Gerais, Brazil, wants carbon credits for not switching from charcoal to coal.

Grandfathering.

Large-scale gaming.

I've had people use my own argument against carbon taxes in support of emissions trading. If carbon use does not respond well to price signals, isn't trading a reasonable alternative? At any rate, shouldn't we use both? But any argument against carbon taxes applies to emission trading as well. Tradable carbon permits are carbon taxes -- only blindfolded, handcuffed, and with their shoelaces tied together.

I've never thought much of emission trading, myself. It always sounded like a game cooked up by bizarro-world hedge fund traders to pretend they're doing something useful while they screw us. But many apparently sensible people think it's a good idea, so I've tended to temper my criticism. Maybe I should trust my intuitions more. Maybe those sensible people should trust rapacious hedge fund traders less.

Beyond comment

From the BBC:

At least 70 people have been killed and scores injured in a double bombing at a university in Baghdad, sources say.

A car bomb blew up outside Mustansiriyah University, and a suicide bomber targeted students as they fled.

Elsewhere in the Iraqi capital, at least 25 people died in car bombings and shootings.

The attacks came as the UN said more than 34,400 Iraqis had died in 2006 in violence across the country.

It also said more than 36,000 civilians were hurt during the year.

The UN's figures were almost three times the Iraqi government's estimate.

...

The BBC's Mike Wooldridge in Baghdad says the bombers apparently attacked at the front and rear entrances of the university building, catching many of the students as they emerged.

A car bomb exploded followed by a suicide bomber who blew himself up among people fleeing the first blast in the predominantly Shia area, police said.

Pictures from the campus showed a scene of devastation, with wrecked and blackened vehicles scattered across a wide area.

"The majority of those killed are female students who were on their way home," Reuters news agency quoted a university official as saying.

"There's glass everywhere and the doors were blown out," the official said.

Police said 170 people were wounded in the blasts, the worst single attack in the capital this year.

The Ministry of Higher Education has issued a plea for blood donors.

Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri Maliki blamed the attack on "a hopeless group of Saddamists and extremists".

Dona nobis pacem, pacem,
Dona nobis pacem.

Nickel and diming us to death

It looks as though copyright will be a hot issue when Parliament reconvenes at the end of the month. Saskboy draws our attention to this CBC article (and has a few pointed words to say himself).

Ever recorded a television show or a movie so you can watch it later? Or ripped a CD so you can listen to it on your MP3 player?

With changes to Canada's copyright laws expected as early as next month, these mundane 21st century activities could theoretically be open to prosecution — unless the Conservative government steps in with expanded "fair use" or "fair dealing" protections for consumers.

Close observers of the file say all signs point to a new regime that will improve safeguards for major music, film and media companies and artists for unpaid use of their material, but neglect to make exemptions for personal use of copyrighted content.

I suspect that "neglect" isn't the appropriate term because it suggests they're just forgetting that minor detail.

The Canadian music industry's usual spokesthingie is in evidence here with a typically simplistic view of the situation:

Graham Henderson of the Canadian Recording Industry Association, one of Canada's top lobbyists for stiffer copyright controls, notes that a variety of digital services have taken off in the United States and started to make up a large percentage of music revenues.

"In Canada, that's not happening and it's not happening because we have a culture here where people just assume it's free," said Henderson.

At Agora Vox, Michael Geist weighs in with a rebuttal to Henderson's position (I've added some formatting for clarity):

there are a multitude of factors for why the Canadian services may not be faring as well as their U.S. counterparts. These include:

- the services arrived later in Canada due to licensing negotiations. The experience in virtually every market (including the U.S.) is that it takes time to gain market acceptance

- there are unsurprisingly fewer services (Canada being a much smaller market), leaving Canadians with less choicethe most popular music service - iTunes - excludes a significant chunk of the Canadian market with its lack of French content

- Canadians may be more concerned with the effects of DRM, including interoperability restrictions, privacy consequences, etc. This points to the fact that policies that promote DRM may actually have negative marketplace effect with reduced consumer acceptance

- Canadians may recognize that they already pay millions every year for the private copying levy and thus feel comfortable with payment to artists via that alternative compensation system

- Canadians may generally be slower to embrace e-commerce, whether clothes, toys, jewelery, or music

- Canadians may have shifted their spending patterns away from music toward other entertainment options including video games, DVDs, etc.

The biggies in the entertainment industry have long had an agenda that involves extending copyright protections beyond any reasonable point while simultaneously gaining more control over how consumers can access content. It would suit them just fine if we can no longer purchase content and call it our own. Instead we would rent it from them. And pay them over and over and over for the same damn thing.

And before you assume that this is strictly a problem with the Conservatives, recall some of the nonsense that came out of the Heritage committee when the Liberals were in charge. In the run up to the last federal election, Liberal MP Sarmite Bulte received some attention she really didn't want when it was revealed that the entertainment industry was going out of its way to raise funds for her campaign. The other MP who's faced similar charges of a conflict of interest involving the same lobbyists is, wait for it, Bev Oda, our current Heritage Minister. I think it's called playing both sides of the street and it appears to be working for them.

Go green--but how?

So the environment is a big issue right now. Everyone likes it, everyone wants to protect it. The real question (except for certain corporate scumbuckets) isn't whether to protect the environment, control emissions and so forth. It's how. Some say the answer is in taxation policy, that the market will solve all our problems if we set the incentives right by taxing “bads” and so forth. Others say that more direct government action is needed, whether in terms of regulation or still more direct action. I've seen lots of arguments, and I've sure got an opinion myself, but much of it has come down to “That wouldn't work!” “Yes it would!” “No it wouldn't”, with everyone pretty much going on the basis of their personal experience and gut instincts about whether markets work and governments don't or whether governments work and markets don't or what.

So I found this article refreshing.

The core for me is this bit:

“Fossil fuels have inelasticities of ~20%, when substitutes considered include other fossil fuels or biofuels. When one takes into consideration uncertainty and the capital and transaction costs of switching, that really is extremely low. The main market failure there really is social costs, for which price increases are a reasonable remedy. But efficiency measures substitute capital costs for operations. You are making long term investments to reduce an operating loss. And there, you have an inelasticity of around 60%. That means doubling the price of energy only reduces use by around 40%.”

(emphasis mine. I'd argue that sustainable energy forms like solar, wind and geothermal heating would work the same way--the main cost is up-front capital cost)

So, to the question of whether carbon taxation and the higher fuel prices resulting would efficiently create changes in energy use, this article answers “no”. It would work to some extent, but very inefficiently. Government action would in the author's opinion be far more effective. He describes some of the problems that block adoption of efficiency measures and new techologies involving up-front capital spending. His opinion is that while carbon taxes have a place, they are just one element of a solution, not something to rely on as the core approach. He notes that,

“Historically, large-scale infrastructure changes take place only via hands-on government involvement -- involvement that not only subsidizes technology but helps shape its deployment. This can consist of public works, or grants of land and rights of way that help shape where infrastructure is placed.”

Of course this is nothing resembling the last word on the subject. With luck there'll be some more words further down this page. But it is at least arguing in a way that's subject to something more than saying “no it isn't!”

Oops

David Kurtz at Talking Points Memo has the latest on what increasingly looks like a campaign to scare lawyers away from providing legal representation to the detainees at Gitmo. The most notable item is, of course, the public statements by Charles Stimson, a lawyer himself and the bureaucrat now responsible for the prison. Writing at The Huffington Post, Jerralyn Merritt of TalkLeft has a review of editorial reactions to Stimson's comments -- all negative -- which attracted this comment:

This Stimson is a lawyer? Where do these "lawyers" - Gonzales, Yoo and this guy - come from? Did they get their law degrees by sending in matchbook covers? Because they certainly don't seem to know much law.

As an example, in a first year class called "torts," everyone with whom I went to law school learned about intentional interference with monetary advantage, a civil wrong just like assault or fraud. Its essence is, in the words of the old Chinese proverb, in trying to break someone else's rice bowl.

When he named the firms in public discourse, in the context in which it was done, Mr. Stimson went as far as he needed to; all that is necessary now is for one of the law firms he named to lose one client because of Stimson's statement. Then he will be liable, and given the kind of clients at whom the remarks were aimed, he will be liable for quite a lot of money.

If the depositions reveal actual malice, which I think is likely, he could be on the hook for punitive damages as well.

That should be kind of fun to watch.

And so another member of the Bush administration reveals that competence isn't high on the list of qualifications for his job. Popcorn all around?

Hat-tip to Laura Rozen at War and Piece.

Friday night blues blogging

Stevie Ray Vaughan and Double Trouble. Tightrope.

On trolls and hijackers

[Note: This post is a joint effort from the POGGE Collective.]

One of the reasons blogging has become so popular is that it provides readers with a way to give authors direct feedback in a way that the traditional media didn't, at least until we bloggers showed them that many readers actually enjoy the opportunity to be more than passive consumers. Over time those consumers can become a community. We at POGGE have been very fortunate in having many thoughtful and articulate visitors. As a result, we have rarely had to resort to banning anyone.

Unfortunately, at any given time there are one or two people who take up permanent residence in our comment threads. In some cases it seems to be because they can't or wouldn't get enough traffic on their own blogs so, instead of working to build their own traffic, they choose to post in our comments in a way that seems very much designed not to engage us but to bypass us and broadcast a contradictory message to our readers. Along the way it's not unusual for them to suggest that we're less than honest brokers, which makes us wonder why they visit so often if they find us so disagreeable. In other cases they are, as Canadian Cynic puts it, "commenters who wander in and decide to make themselves comfortable and set up shop for the foreseeable future, simply to pick fights with whatever I choose to write about." These are the people we call hijackers.

Aside from disrupting the community and the conversation and even chasing other thoughtful commenters away, there's a practical problem here: if every post that's published brings with it an additional burden of moderating comments to keep things on track -- and to keep World War XIV from breaking out -- it can actually make an author reluctant to bother posting. It can really ruin the buzz. So regardless of the reason for their presence, hijackers of our comment threads will no longer be tolerated.

POGGE is not now, never has been and never will be a free speech zone. The only people with a right to speak here are the people listed as contributors on the masthead. All others are here at the discretion of that group. We don't want to discourage those who honestly want to engage us and we appreciate there is a vague line between honest disagreement and hijacking but in the end, somebody has to make that distinction. Our house, our rules. Anyone who we feel has crossed that line will be banned.

-30-

With this message, I am signing off from all blogging duties here at POGGe.

I have quit blogging once before, and to be honest, my reasons haven’t changed that much since the last time. I find time to be an increasingly precious commodity, and I have a family that demands and deserves more of it. Anyway, you’ve heard all this folderol before from other bailing bloggers, so I won’t bore you with it any further.

I am proud to have been part of this group. It is great to see how the space has grown over the past year and change, and it has been extremely rewarding to engage the fantastic group of commenters we are blessed with. Some are so fantastic that we shamelessly snap them up and add them to the roster. (I’m looking at you, PLG.)

I must thank Pogge for welcoming me here, and for allowing me to voice my screeds on his pseudo-eponymous blog. This was already an exceptionally good site when he ran it alone, and he was generous in allowing writers with very different styles to invade this space. In the process, he fostered the creation of a political blog with one of the most interesting group voices around.

To mahigan, skdadl, nightingale and indeed all my fellow rabble-rousers at POGGe, I thank you for letting me part of such a superb team. Despite this place already having a formidable roster, the recent additions of Kevin, Ian and PLG have added tremendous depth and new perspectives to the commentary here. The readers of this site are in excellent hands.

Speaking of readers, I must thank you to. You folks agreed with me, disagreed with me and corrected me on a few occasions, and I have enjoyed the give-and-take tremendously. This conversation is, to me, the essence of blogging, and I appreciate the time you folks took to offer substantial responses to my posts.

With that, I revert to an old habit from my journalism days, and declare this my final take.

See you in the comments.

Checks and balances

Mainly because of the Maher Arar case I've written fairly often in the last few years about law enforcement and intelligence agencies. One of the things I've said repeatedly is that I expect those agencies to lobby for powers they shouldn't really have. I can be critical of them for losing their objectivity but it's human nature and it's really government, and especially elected officials, that I expect to provide the balance and to ensure our rights as citizens aren't being lost in the shuffle.

I could say somewhat the same thing about military procurement.

The military branch at National Defence has grabbed control of the procurement process from the hands of the department's civilian branch, the former top bureaucrat on the acquisition file at DND said in an interview.

Alan Williams, the retired assistant deputy minister for procurement, said the consequences of this recent change are massive: Canadians stand to pay hundreds of millions of dollars in extra costs in coming military purchases, with no guarantee of obtaining the best product.

In support of his contention, Williams offers up the story of Rick Hillier and the Chinook helicopter.

When General Rick Hillier became Chief of the Defence Staff in February, 2005, he and Mr. Williams had a meeting during which Gen. Hillier laid out his desire for a specific helicopter built by Boeing.

"He told me, 'Alan, we need Chinooks,' " Mr. Williams said. "I said, 'Rick, your job is to define the requirements, and my job is to work the system and find the optimum solution to meet your needs."

Gen. Hillier eventually got his wish, as the Tory government approved the purchase of 16 Chinook helicopters, saying it was the only aircraft to meet the requirements of the Canadians Forces.

This isn't the only example of single-source contracts the story mentions.

I'm not the least bit surprised that Hillier's mouth waters when he sees the top of the line equipment that his American counterparts have. And it's entirely possible that the Chinook is the right purchase. But this and other recent stories suggest that the process has gotten screwed up. In the rush to be seen to correct what they criticized the Liberals for -- neglecting our military -- Canada's New Government™ has thrown over the necessary oversight to ensure our dollars are being spent responsibly. At the very least.

I also find it fascinating that Conservatives, those proud and vocal supporters of free enterprise and competition, don't seem to know how to shop. If Boeing knows going in that they've got a lock on the deal, where's the incentive for them to offer their best price? But if you conduct a competitive bidding process and don't tip your hand then the companies that want your business have to dig a little deeper and earn that business.

It's called bargaining. Maybe the Conservatives ought to try it.

Troop surges and economy of force

I assume that most of us are past being astonished that President Bush is about to announce yet another new strategy for salvaging the débacle in Iraq. I assume that most people are even past hoping that the U.S. Congress will suddenly wake up, recognize that the emperor has no clothes, and refuse to play any further part in his fantasies:

A day before Bush’s nationally televised speech describing his proposal, Sen. Edward Kennedy, a longtime critic of Bush and the war, will propose legislation denying him the billions needed to send more troops to war unless Congress agrees first. Though it was unclear whether the bill would ever reach the full Senate, it could at least serve as a rallying point for the most insistent foes of the Iraq conflict.

Democrats seem divided on whether to block funds for troop increases, but many were not ruling it out. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., said Democrats would "look at everything" in their power to curb the war, short of cutting money for troops already in the field.

One of the senators briefed by the president yesterday on the proposed “surge” of an extra 20,000 troops typifies the reluctance of American political elites, even now, to stop playing along with phony announcements of new commitments from the Iraqis, as if such new commitments are now or ever were in the power of the Iraqi government to make, no matter how often they are announced. From the G&M link:

Any sort of timetable to leave would amount to an about-face for Mr. Bush, who previously insisted that a departure date would only embolden insurgents. But pushing the Iraqi government to take the lead or face the grim prospect of a full-blown civil war after U.S. troops leave appears to be emerging as a strategy to force Baghdad's hand.

Mr. Bush's plan had its genesis in a proposal from Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, who pledged to bolster security if the United States sends more troops, Republican Senator Gordon Smith said yesterday, according to Reuters.

The Iraqi commitments include more military divisions, using certain tactics without regard to religious sects, and a promise not to shield Shia cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, Mr. Smith said.

"The President understands there's a real sense of urgency, [and] that it is done in such a way that also is going to put the Iraqis in leading positions, sooner rather than later," White House spokesman Tony Snow said yesterday.

When has that not been the line peddled for public consumption in both the U.S. and Iraq? It is precisely the line peddled by the administration from the start, even as Bremer and Rumsfeld eviscerated any effective Iraqi military or police force with their mindless de-Baathification program..

The renewed threat to al-Sadr is perhaps semi-news. Moving against him was stupid the first time that plan was tried – and abandoned -- in 2004. Now, with the insurgency in Sunni-held territory much worse and with al-Sadr’s power and prestige among Shiites consequently greater, given the failure of the American and British occupiers to establish any semblance of order, Prime Minister al-Maliki could have only one reason to announce that his pathetic regime is going to crack down on al-Sadr: pressure from Washington, where that kind of unreality-based spin obviously still works.

Apart from our sense of a common humanity with the people of a country now approaching bloody chaos and collapse, what strategic interest would Canadians have in President Bush’s latest new toy, his "troop surge"?

A US Army battalion fighting in a critical area of eastern Afghanistan is due to be withdrawn within weeks to deploy to Iraq.

Army Brigadier General Anthony J. Tata and other US commanders say that will happen as the Taliban is expected to unleash a campaign to cut the vital road between Kabul and Kandahar.

The official said the Taliban intend to seize Kandahar, Afghanistan's second-largest city, where the group was organized in the 1990s.

"We anticipate significant events there next spring," Tata said.

What I found most interesting about that entirely predictable report in the Boston Globe was the spin that American commanders are putting on the crisis in Afghanistan, which the American media seem content to propagate uncritically:

With NATO unable or unwilling to stem the rising violence, the Taliban are pressing their advantage.

Really? NATO troops are unable or unwilling to stem the flood of a variety of fighters, not all of them Taliban, over the border with Pakistan? Perhaps President Musharraf has been unwilling to curb the renascent Afghan resistance forces organizing freely in the border regions? Perhaps President Bush has been unwilling to force President Musharraf’s co-operation in the war in Afghanistan because President Bush has other priorities when he plays cards with President Musharraf?

This is how American military commanders speak to the American press about the mission in Afghanistan now:

Conway said US commanders understand that the Afghan war is an "economy of force" operation, a military term for a mission that is given minimal resources because it is a secondary priority, in this case behind Iraq.

And we have to be grateful to General Conway, I suppose, and to the Boston Globe for their casual honesty about the brutal and ill-defined mission in which Canadian soldiers are now losing their lives, along with much greater numbers of Afghans. I doubt that General Conway has ever imagined he was speaking to any audience but loyal Americans, but his frankness is welcome none the less.

We are never going to hear George W. Bush or Stephen Harper telling us that NATO soldiers’ lives are being thrown away in Afghanistan in the service of a diversionary tactic in a bigger war, but that is what is happening. We may well hear American politicians beginning to trash NATO forces for being “unwilling or unable,” much as American politicians have always found it useful to trash UN forces after U.S. diplomacy has trapped the UN in similar double-binds.

But Canadians have now heard from the front just where their soldiers fit into the economy of force dictated by the major players in a much bigger war than Stephen Harper or Peter MacKay seems “willing or able” to speak about honestly to the citizens in whose name our soldiers fight and die.

What self-respecting general would agree to see her/his troops used as sacrificial lambs in the subplot of some other nation’s grand narrative? And what responsible citizen could support such a travesty, carried on murderously, destructively, pointlessly, in our name?

Hat tip to liberal catnip for the Boston Globe reference.

Friday night blues blogging

Katie Webster and Gatemouth Brown. Every Day I Have The Blues.

Net Neutrality and Internet Cliches:

Will the internet start interpreting the USA as damage, and route around it?

In the US in particular, various powerful corporate forces envision the internet as basically something for email, maybe a bit of propaganda, and online shopping, some of the latter being overt and some relatively disguised. They don't have a lot of use for independent content. They'd be quite happy to make everyone pay through the nose to push content through “their” channels; their ideas of intervention make the Chinese censorship look pretty minimal by comparison. If your name happens to be Time Warner, you could probably get a deal that, while revoltingly expensive as a lump sum, isn't too prohibitive given how much crap would be covered under it. If your name happens to be Joe Blow internet hosting, or ZNet, or perhaps Peace, Order and Good Government, Eh?, or something like that, the situation could be somewhat different. There are various free blogging services; I don't pretend to understand how they continue to exist now, but it seems likely they'd start to strain if some cable company got to charge them any time one of said cable company's customers accessed one of their blogs.

So the idea of canning net neutrality is clearly a major threat to the anarchic nature of the internet as we know it. Hopefully there are enough countervailing forces, including disgruntled or even activist internet users, that it won't happen. But what would happen if they actually did it?

Well, that's where the internet cliches come in. We all know the old “interprets censorship as damage and routes around it” meme. But the Chinese and Iranians, among others, have to some extent been giving it the lie. There does seem to be some capacity for government action to control what happens on the web. Another metaphor slung around for web freedom is the “frontier”, which kind of implies that once the sheriffs start coming in and closing things down the wide open nature of the web, and to some extent the implicitly egalitarian nature of the web, will start coming to an end. Which cliche is closer to reality?

There are already challenges and workarounds to net censorship in places like Iran and China, and the outcome of such struggles is unclear. Seems to me it might be a bridge too far for the corporate control freaks. Web hosting might start shifting away from the US, among other things. Many medium-sized operations, even corporate ones (one elephant in this living room would be p-o-r-n), would try hard to duck these new costs any way they could. There has already been widespread discussion about the inadvisability of leaving domain name registry an American-centred, private thing. The destruction of net neutrality in the US would probably push such talk over the top—how can you leave a core function of the web in the control of a private company in the country where private companies are trying to kill the web? Hackers would work vigorously to neuter the extra costs, since in the end many of them would be falling on the individual consumer. Non-web protocols might be reinvigorated; Freenet would acquire the same unintended double meaning as Free Software. Community, municipal and state internet infrastructure projects (which would be explicitly committed to not charging net-neutrality violating fees) might be reinvigorated.

In the long run, if the net neutrality killers stick to their guns I can envision two webs—a US ghetto, redrawn to corporate specifications. And the rest of the world (plus US pirate web-users), more like the current web as we know it, except way less English-centred. Which leaves one key question for us—which camp would Canada be in? And should we be watching out for early attempts to push us into the US camp in this, as in so many other things? Absolute worst case, I can well imagine a Canadian government, Conservative on general principles, Liberals perhaps to bend over backwards to make up for some perceived slight they handed the USians, actually sucking up so hard as to kill net neutrality *before* the US did, and then the US not doing it after all. There we'd be stuck in a mini-ghetto, while the corporations that benefitted from the kill would of course be so influential that it would be ridiculously difficult to take their candy away again.

Increasing the Minimum Wage

So Ontario is planning to increase the minimum wage and the usual suspects, who sort of remember Economics 101, are out in force bewailing the horrors that will ensure if the lowest earning workers are paid a slightly less lousy wage then they are right now.

Economic theory long held that if you increased the minimum wage, it ought to reduce employment. It only makes sense - presumably at higher wages it's less worth hiring some people who are marginally productive.

Unfortunately, as the line runs, this is a case of "a beautiful theory ruined by ugly facts". A number of studies have been done, and none of them have found more than a very minor loss of jobs - some have actually found that raising the minimum wage increases employment!

Kash at the Street Light has written probably the best simple introduction to the issue. You should probably go read part one and part two. For those who prefer excerpts, here you go:

The article that really started what’s now called “the new minimum wage research" (the research of the past 15 years or so that has called into question the classical prediction that raising the minimum wage will reduce employment) was the famous paper by David Card and Alan Krueger, “Minimum Wages and Employment: A Case Study of the Fast-Food Industry in New Jersey and Pennsylvania”. From the paper’s abstract:

On April 1, 1992, New Jersey's minimum wage rose from $4.25 to $5.05 per hour. To evaluate the impact of the law, the authors surveyed 410 fast-food restaurants in New Jersey and eastern Pennsylvania before and after the rise. Comparisons of employment growth at stores in New Jersey and Pennsylvania (where the minimum wage was constant) provide simple estimates of the effect of the higher minimum wage. The authors also compare employment changes at stores in New Jersey that were initially paying high wages (above $5.00) to the changes at lower-wage stores. They find no indication that the rise in the minimum wage reduced employment.

Since that paper was published in 1994, there has been a host of new research trying to confirm or contradict Card and Krueger’s startling result that the rise in minimum wages, if anything, led to increased employment in the quintessential minimum wage industry, the fast food industry. (That's what econonomists do, after all - try to destroy each others' results. But at least it's all in good fun. Mostly.)

Lots of different strategies have been employed, from studies that look at national employment trends and how they respond to changes in the federal minimum wage, to other studies that look at state-wide or city-wide minimum wage laws. Several papers have found that raising the minimum wage actually had positive effects on employment, while a few (particularly those that focus only on teenage employment, such as this paper by Burkhauser, Couch, and Wittenburg) found that it had negative but generally small effects on employment.

This pretty little graph show's you visually what the most recent study Kash found discovered (San Fran raised its minimum wage in 2004 to $8.50. The graph is of restaurant employment.

As Kash notes, you don't need fancy math to see it either made no difference, or it actually slightly improved employment.

Raising the minimum wage to $8 in Ontario won't have any significant effect on employment. Frankly I doubt even an increase to $10 an hour, as the NDP is suggesting, would have any significant negative effects on employment or the economy. Speaking as someone who once earned minimum wage, and who remembers what a big deal getting even an extra 50 cents an hour was, however, I can say that it will make a huge difference to minimum wage workers and others who have their wage raised by it.

On reputation

This is a story about correcting the record. You could file it under "Advice I should take myself but often forget." Or you could just read it as a book report, a short tribute to a story that moved me when I first read it many years ago and that often comes back to me in times of trouble.

The story is called "The Light-Years"; it is the second-last story in Italo Calvino's charming collection Cosmicomics (1965; trans 1968). The stories in Cosmicomics are all connected by one character, our friend and (usually) narrator Qfwfq, who has lived through all time from the Big Bang onwards and who domesticates the cosmos for us by relating his own adventures through some of its more significant moments.

At the beginning of "The Light-Years," old Qfwfq happens to notice, as he is observing the sky with his telescope one night, a sign hanging from a galaxy a hundred million light-years away. The sign says "I SAW YOU." Alarmed, Qfwfq quickly calculates the moment on earth (two hundred million light-years previous) that would date back to that sighting in the distant galaxy, checks his diary, and realizes, to his horror, that it was the one moment in his long life that he might be considered to have done something disreputable.

Not that he's going to admit that. He thinks at first of replying to the distant galaxy with a sign of his own, like "LET ME EXPLAIN," or "I'D LIKE TO HAVE SEEN YOU IN MY PLACE." Then he realizes that that might be admitting too much and considers alternatives, like "DID YOU REALLY SEE EVERYTHING OR JUST A LITTLE BIT?"

The slowness of the exchange that would result, though, given the expanding universe into the bargain, convinces Qfwfq to begin by minimizing the incident with a sign that says "WHAT OF IT?" Immediately, though, he realizes that if one galaxy had seen him in a bad light, others might have seen that very moment too, or word might have got around, as it does. So he begins to scan the sky every night for gossip, and sure enough, the signs begin to pop up on different constellations, one "I SAW YOU" after another, except for one celestial body where a sign appears saying "WE CAN'T SEE A DAMN THING."

Briefly, he tries nose-thumbing one constellation after another, with signs saying "FAT LOT I CARE" or "TANT PIS." Briefly, he calms himself again with the thought that by now, one distant body after another will be seeing a much later moment in which his behaviour had been absolutely radiant, and he begins to scan the skies for evidence of everyone's improved opinion of him, maybe even their admiration. He calculates; he waits; the night finally arrives when the first of the distant galaxies should have seen him at his most estimable. He looks for a sign, and he sees one. It says "TRA-LA-LA-LA."

Frantically, he scans the other galaxies for more diligent observers. One signals back to him: "YOU HAVE A FLANNEL UNDERSHIRT." Nights later, he reads on another "THAT CHARACTER'S REALLY ON THE BALL," which would have cheered him except that written underneath in smaller letters he discerns the words "WHO THE HELL CAN HE BE?"

Much else happens in this intergalactic exchange. While the signs become more and more frustrating to Qfwfq (and amusing to his readers), Qfwfq keeps coming up with ever more creative ways of restoring his reputation or promoting an admirable new one, all the time keeping up his increasingly wild calculations of the light-years involved in sending messages back and forth. At one point he acquires an enormous directional sign, a huge hand with a pointing index finger, to aim at himself at any moment when he figures he is performing especially well. When he fumbles that sign, he makes a "CORRECTION" sign. Inevitably, he goes on to a further "IGNORE CORRECTION" sign.

He schemes obessively and he calculates and he waits fixedly, desperate to convince the rest of the universe that they have been all wrong about him, that he is worthy of their love, their praise, or at least that he is not deserving of their judgement against him. But the time comes when he is forced to recognize that the galaxies for whom he is most compromised are already spinning beyond transmissibility. Some of them are about to move out of his range, carrying with them the memory of his one disreputable moment into infinity, a memory he is never going to be able to affect, certainly not to control, not ever ...

That part is written very beautifully.

The end.

Housekeeping

Bumped and updated

Some of you may have noticed that I'm in the process of rearranging the furniture a bit. I'm now working on the template that formats the page for the individual entry and comments and those changes don't show up until each individual entry is rebuilt. I mention that because it means that until the changes are finalized and I do a complete rebuild, things may be a little inconsistent around here. Please bear with us.

I'm testing my changes in three different browsers but that doesn't mean I've got all the bases covered. If I break anything beyond all recognition, feel free to yell at me in the comments to this post.

Update:

I had to remove the sidebar from the individual entry pages and revert to the old format after getting a report (and confirming) that it was misbehaving in some versions of Internet Exploder Explorer. I'll have to attack it a different way.

Update #2:

The sidebar is back on the individual pages but Internet Explorer is awfully fussy about what I put in there. Everything seems to be working and all the entries have been rebuilt. As always, yell at me if I broke it. If you can't comment, I'd appreciate you hitting my email link under Contributors and letting me know.

Can you say projection, Jason?

Apparently Jason Cherniak is upset. Again.

Jason wants the NDP to "clean up their web presence" because some people on a message board called Bread and Roses said harsh things about him. And we certainly can't have that. The trouble is, that message board has no connection with the NDP.

I've noticed a certain trend lately that's on the increase. So many fine young Liberal operatives respond to criticism of themselves and their party leaders by assuming that it must be partisan spin, usually on behalf of the Dippers. Since they apparently never express an opinion publicly without checking the latest edition of Liberal Talking Points™, they assume everyone else does the same. Except that a lot of us don't; we just say what we think. Jason really ought to consider the possibility that if a number of people thought a post he wrote yesterday was just dumb, it's because that's what they really thought.

I was hoping this silliness would fade once the Liberals straightened out their leadership situation. Guess I was wrong.

Some Predictions for the New Year

Here are my predictions for Canada in 2007:

1. Stéphane Dion will be the next Prime Minister, elected with a strong minority or even a slim majority.
2. Stephen Harper, Jack Layton, and possibly Gilles Duceppe will step down as a result of 1.
3. The Dion government will enter office under very high expectations which it will struggle to meet.

Why do I think this?

First of all, I think that Dion's Liberals have a natural edge over the Conservatives in the next election. To put it bluntly, Harper has been trying to govern like a Liberal while making moves to keep his base happy. Dion can govern like a Liberal without compromising, obviously, because his base wants that. As I've pointed out before, there's a strong correlation between the Liberals having a federalist Quebecker as a leader and electoral victory. Unless something unexpected happens during the campaign the voters who left the Liberal party during the last couple of elections are going to be inclined to return. In order to win, Dion just has to let them do so, while the other leaders have to actively work to prevent it. Yes, Dion could blow it, or one of the other leaders could run a really great campaign...certainly the last election should be proof that campaigns matter. However, I think the odds favour Dion.

The second prediction is a pretty obvious collorary of the first. I can't see Harper staying on if he loses his minority--I don't think he'd want to, and even if he did, the party probably wouldn't let him. Similarly, a loss in NDP vote probably means that Layton is gone. Duceppe is a more interesting case. I've heard that the polling numbers in Quebec are much worse for the BQ than they appear, because the Liberals and the Conservatives aren't competing with each other. The Liberals are doing well in Montreal and the border ridings--their traditional areas--while the Conservatives are making gains in areas where the Liberals were locked out in the past.

The third also follows from the first. Conventional wisdom right now is that Harper should win the next election, at least with a minority. Conventional wisdom has been consistently wrong for the past few years, of course, as it has held that the Liberals were unbeatable, that Paul Martin would recover to a majority, that the Conservatives were guaranteed to hold office for a decade, that Frank McKenna would be the next Liberal leader, that Michael Ignatieff would be the next Liberal leader, etc. etc. However, when CW is proven wrong, it tends to overreact and swing hard in the other direction. So, if Dion wins, then CW will make a bigger deal of his victory than it probably should. Thus the high expectations.

So, that’s my best guess. Feel free to tell me why I’m insane in comments below.

The Beaver connects the dots

Dave at The Galloping Beaver has begun a splendid two-part post on the history of Iraq's oil industry and the international politics that have swirled around it since the 1970s.

I can't even say I wish I had written that because I never could have. But I am very grateful that Dave has.