Dear Justin, Please Fix This. NOW!

We knew that Harper and civil liberties were like an oil spill and water. Nothing good could come of that combination. After all, it's what gave us C-51.

In no time it's been shown that C-51 has become a powerful suppressant of press freedom in Canada. CBC News has a report on La Presse journo, Patrick LaGace and how the Montreal police were able to use Harper's new police state laws to obtain 24-warrants this past year to monitor LaGace's iPhone.

"The new powers that the police have to survey Canadians are absolutely horrifying, they're basically limitless, there's very little oversight, and when that happens the system will be ripe for abuse, and this is just an example of how it's abused," said Tom Henheffer, executive director of Canadian Journalists for Free Expression.

LaGace says this was an exercise in pure intimidation:

Lagacé said police told him he was being used as a "tool" in an investigation into one of its own officers.

"I was flabbergasted because I thought that in this country it takes very, very serious motives to track and spy on a journalist like that — motives that are so serious that's it's never happened before," Lagacé said in an interview with CBC News on Monday.

"My metadata was transferred to the police. The police had the right to activate the GPS in my phone — to locate me at any time. I lived in this fiction that this could not happen in this country."

And there's more, much more:

In September, the Sûreté du Québec seized Journal de Montréal reporter Michael Nguyen's computer because they believed he illegally obtained information cited in a story he wrote.

At the same time, the RCMP has been trying to get a reporter from Vice News to hand over background materials used for stories on a suspected terrorist.

Last May, CBC News revealed that a rogue group of Mounties investigating the leak of a secret document spied on two Canadian journalists for more than a week without any authorization.

So, Justin, don't be a total dick. You've got the big majority. Fix this. NOW!

The Gamble - High Stakes for Harper, Trudeau and Mulcair

The collapse of world oil prices is reverberating through Canada's petro-provinces; Alberta, Saskatchewan, Newfoundland and Labrador; and the fallout should yet might not be a major issue when Canadians go to the polls for a dominant fragment of eligible voters to decide who will govern our flagging petro-state, Canada.

Watch for Stephen Harper to try to control the election narrative as never before. In previous elections against Dion and Ignatieff, Harper's pitch was "there's nobody better to handle the economy and, besides, look at this dork."  He defeated the Dion Liberals for a Conservative minority and, quite predictably, the Ignatieff Liberals for a Conservative majority.

This time the Harper narrative will shift.  Just as Afghanistan lost its political lustre when everything Harper had said he would accomplish turned to dust, this time we won't hear much about the economy.  Harper won't want to run on the state of the Canadian economy and no one would.  What's called for is a bit of electoral bait and switch. This time it will be all about the dreaded terrorists and that dork, Trudeau.  It's a contest in which Harper already has Trudeau partially disarmed.

By supporting Bill C-51, Trudeau and Company have given themselves two choices.  They can agree with Harper that C-51 is somehow needed, even at the expense of our democracy and civil liberties.  Or the Trudeau Libs can allow themselves to be seen as willing to sacrifice our democracy and civil liberties in a cynical effort to retain their edge over Harper.

The trouble with C-51 - for starters - is that it presupposes that our existing criminal and state security powers aren't adequate to meet the terrorist threat. That's never been demonstrated.  Where's the proof?  There is none, none at all.

It's telling that we haven't explored what, if anything, went wrong with our homebrew terrorist attacks or what we can do within the existing system to shore up our vulnerabilities.  We have pretty clear laws.  We have lots of personnel and we can hire more if needed.  We have some pretty solid intelligence resources. No one has made the case for C-51 and, here's the important part, Conservative or Liberal they're not even trying.

There's been no attempt to balance the often conflicting objectives of freedom and security.  Ben Franklin warned that those who sacrifice freedom for the sake of security deserve (and usually get) neither.

C-51, for so long as its odious provisions remain on the books, alters the relationship between the Canadian people and their government.  Our freedoms are diminished while the government's powers over us are increased.  Dissent can be criminalized.  The state security apparatus can be invoked to intimidate us. An American energy company snaps its fingers and the Stasi RCMP are on your doorstep demanding explanations.  Tell them to "go to Hell" and see what happens, what lists your name is entered on.  In the eyes (and ears, and surveillance labyrinth) of the state, you've gone from being a nobody to a duly noted suspect.  That's the mutated status of your citizenship.

Taken on its own, C-51 is bad enough.  Add it to the multi-layered cloak of neoliberalism that has infested all three of our major parties and it becomes something else again.

Harper is steaming ahead with C-51 precisely because he knows the Trudeau Libs will crater just as they're doing.  He knows that Trudeau fears (yes, that's the word "fear" and it comes with an inescapable stench) that standing up for Canadians by opposing C-51 could cost the Liberals votes in October.  What Trudeau doesn't realize is that his capitulation to Harper's will can only further divide and weaken Harper's opposition.  Harper gets to play to his base.  Trudeau gets to fracture his support. Meanwhile the undecided are increasingly less able to distinguish the Conservatives from the Liberals by what they each stand for and, worse, what they both stand for.

You know what else Harper sees in Trudeau's boot-licking?  It's the perfect set up for yet another electoral Donnybrook between the NDP and LPC.  It's a gift to Tom Mulcair and to Stephen Harper and there's little doubt that Mulcair will use Trudeau's perfidy as a club to beat the Liberal leader to a pulp.  If Ignatieff hadn't been enough to drive me out of the Liberal ranks, I expect this would have.  Sap the NDP's uncertain strength, focus its energies mainly on Trudeau, while compelling Trudeau to defend the Liberals from attacks on both fronts and the ultimate winner is - Stephen Harper.  Mulcair can't resist a second term as leader of the official opposition.  It's just too good to pass up and he won't.

At the end of the day the real losers will be you, me, and Canada.

This is Canada. Of Course We Live In a Democracy. Right? Think Again.

Do you know the difference between liberal democracy and illiberal democracy? It can be a complex issue.  There are oodles of papers to read if you really want to get a handle on it but, for now, here's a somewhat useful explanation taken from Wiki.

An illiberal democracy, also called a pseudo democracy, partial democracy, low intensity democracy,empty democracy or hybrid regime,[1] is a governing system in which, although elections take place, citizens are cut off from knowledge about the activities of those who exercise real power because of the lack of civil liberties. It is not an 'open society'. There are many countries "that are categorized as neither "free" nor "not free," but as "probably free," falling somewhere between democratic and nondemocratic regimes."[2] This may be because a constitution limiting government powers exists, but its liberties are ignored, or because an adequate legal constitutional framework of liberties does not exist.[3]

There's no neat definition, no universal litmus test, that reveals illiberal democracy but, make no mistake, it's spreading quite fast around the world and it will come to impact our everyday lives.  It intends to do just that. It may begin as a barely noticeable disorder, a political irritation leading to indignation, steadily worsening but only incrementally at worst, before it becomes established as a national, constitutional affliction.

The United States has, in many aspects, become an illiberal democracy.  Its dysfunctional, "bought and paid for" Congress is a manifestation of this.  The United States Supreme Court with its outrageous rulings such as Citizens United is another telltale.  The influence of shady operators like the Koch Brothers and Sheldon Adelson leave little doubt that government "of the people, by the people, for the people" has been reduced to a quaint and dispensable notion.

Bill C-51 is a tribute to illiberal democracy.  It's the very sort of stuff that defines illiberal democracy.  Here's another example from the morning papers:

Washington State has documents outlining emergency response plans for a Kinder Morgan pipeline – plans similar to those British Columbians have been told by Canada’s National Energy Board they’re not allowed to see due to security concerns.

The B.C. government lost a battle with the National Energy Board in January to have greater access to Kinder Morgan’s Trans Mountain pipeline emergency response plan (ERP). Kinder Morgan had already provided B.C. with a version of the plan, but significant portions were blacked out.

The denied information included specific response times, valve locations, and evacuation zone maps. The government had argued it needed the entire plan to be able to understand Kinder Morgan’s ability to respond to an oil spill. The proposed $6.5-billion Trans Mountain expansion would twin the pipeline and triple the capacity for Alberta oil intended for Asian markets.

But in Washington State – where the pipeline would cross through to Puget Sound – Kinder Morgan has provided a more comprehensive response plan.

...The U.S. plan includes information on response timelines, the availability of emergency equipment near specific pipeline sections, and a list of companies that could help out after an oil spill.

In HarperLand, Washington State can compel disclosure from American pipeline operator, Kinder Morgan, but the utterly rigged, completely Harperian National Energy Board will block British Columbia from demanding that same information. That's the glaring, ugly face of illiberal democracy in Canada.  The dice are loaded, the deck is stacked - we haven't got a chance.

Yes, we still get to vote every now and then but, in the aftermath, government operates behind closed doors.  Harper was onto that from the get go, severing the public's and the media's access to the public service, the armed forces to boot, and thereby quietly transforming them into the prime minister's personal, partisan political agencies.  This veil of illiberal democracy descended over Canada upon Harper's first minority win and remains even stronger today.  The media whined and whimpered for a while but they've long been tamed.  Even our opposition parties, those who tell us they would like to run the country, go along with it.

I've never heard of a nation existing on the basis of going along to get along. Maybe that's because they tend to die off early.,