Okay, Liberals - The "All You Can Eat Buffet" is Open

It's not that often Liberals get to say nice things about The Tyee but there's a lot of good stuff in it, sometimes even for Grits.  A very popular entree at the moment is a 2015 Tyee article, "Harper, Serial Abuser of Power: the Evidence Compiled."

The article lists a handsome array of 70 Harper government "assaults on democracy and the law."

This isn't directly flattering to the Justin Trudeau Liberals but it does help remind us that Harper was way more corrupt than the current regime.  Then again, he had nearly a decade to abuse Canada's democracy and our laws. Justin is barely out of the starting blocks.

It's perfect when you need one of those "yeah, well whatabout" moments.

Once Again, Ottawa Fails the Coast

British Columbia's salt water fishery is controlled out of Ottawa by the Department of Fisheries and Oceans. That's the same bunch that bungled the east coast fishery leading to the severe collapse of the once bountiful cod stocks.

Now DFO is screwing up the west coast, starting with our herring stocks.

Those herring play a vital role in maintaining the upper tiers of our food chain. They're the food stock for baleen whales and our prized salmon. Those salmon, in turn, sustain the resident orca population.  Our salmon are now endangered. So too are those magnificent orcas, who may soon also have to cope with Trudeau's armada of bitumen laden supertankers.

Why then is Mr. Trudeau's DFO still allowing our herring to be pillaged?  Ask Ian McAllister, executive director of Pacific Wild.

Pacific Wild, just a day earlier, had posted a video in which McAllister said, among other things, “We really should be leaving this fish in the water ... This is basis for the food supply of the entire Salish Sea, the basis of our coastal economy, and yet we’re turning this wild herring into fish farm pellets and cat food. This fishery should not ever have been allowed.”

...There is an echo here of the infamous standoffs on logging roads in Haida Gwaii, Clayoquot Sound, the Kootenays, the Stein Valley, the Skagit, pick your spot — and of the enduring faceoffs over tarsands pipelines and mines and dams and fish farms and tanker bans, among other so-called policy “choices” that we leave to the least qualified people in the world, politicians, to adjudicate, based on what they piously claim to be reliable science that supports their even more reliable need to shore up their prospects of re-election with evidence of economic growth and jobs for middle-class Canadians. 

Jonathan Wilkinson, our federal fisheries minister, personifies the Trudeau-era cabinet-minister-as-dittohead. “It’s in the national interest. It’s in the national interest,” they all chant about the orca-killing Trans Mountain Pipeline Expansion project, all evidence to the contrary. In the case of the herring fishery, “We make our decisions based on science,” Minister Wilkinson says reassuringly, if credulously.

And so this year, while all that science-based management has led to the closure of commercial fisheries in four other major areas of the coast — Haida Gwaii, Prince Rupert, the central coast and the west coast of Vancouver Island — the minister took the advice of his boffins and approved the extraction of 21,493 tonnes of herring in the Strait of Georgia. By Pacific Wild’s calculation, that’s 130 million fish. As of Saturday, the seine fleet had successfully killed about half that number; over the weekend, the gillnet fleet was on target to finish the job.

...At some point, you have to wonder how many fisheries scientists can dance on the head of a pin. Rightly or wrongly, Ottawa thinks the fleet can take 130 million fish out of the water without making a dent in the stock’s “long-term” ability to reproduce. Locally, confidence in that decision is low. 

Grant Scott, who chairs Conservancy Hornby Island, says his community first put on a herring festival two years ago as a seasonal celebration of the herring spawn. Within a year it had dawned on them that the festival might better be used to publicize how dire the prospects for herring are. This year, an online petition calling for the fishery to be closed has attracted close to 72,000 signatures and counting.

...To the south of the fleet, another long-term resident and observer of the Salish Sea, Stephen Hume, writes, “If science is so good at predicting abundance, why are 80 per cent of herring sites now closed? 

“We’ve fished stocks to collapse before, amid repeated assurances that the fisheries science shows harvests to be sustainable,” he reminds. “In the 1950s, overfishing of Japan’s herring led to a collapse. In the 1960s, the California sardine fishery collapsed. Herring fisheries in Alaska and B.C. were closed in the 1960s after overfished stocks collapsed. Overfishing destroyed herring stocks off Iceland, Norway and Russia around the same time. In 1972, the overfished Peruvian anchovy fishery collapsed. In 1992, Canada’s Atlantic cod went the way of the herring, sardines and anchovies. Cod stocks that had supported Newfoundland fisheries for 500 years suddenly fell to one percent of what it had been at its maximum biomass.” 

“One common factor in these serial fisheries disasters,” Hume writes, “is that regulators were convinced harvests were sustainable — until they suddenly weren’t.”

... Pacific Wild has produced an analysis — Top Ten Arguments against the Strait of Georgia commercial seine and gill net herring fishery — and, going to some lengths to reference its conclusions to available science, ends up citing DFO on almost every page. Whether that science can be trusted or not is hardly Pacific Wild’s responsibility; whether its interpretation of DFO science can be trusted, is. But one of the failings of our resource management system now, especially after the Harper years but even now in the Trans Mountain era, is that our agencies are so deeply distrusted because they are so deeply conflicted. 

Agencies like DFO and the National Energy Board have tremendous research budgets and their conclusions are backed by authority of law, but they’ve become what environmental lawyer Eugene Kung has referred to as “captured regulators.” They can no longer be trusted to interpret their research in the public interest because of the pressure of private interests: respectively, commercial fishing and fish farm industries, and in the case of the NEB, powerful energy interests.

Why should coastal British Columbians see the federal government as other than a predatory scourge? Instead of protecting our coast and our endangered marine life they unleash their captured regulators, the National Energy Board and DFO, and scream "national interest, national interest" to stifle anyone who stands up to them.

And, before Trudeau's fan club dismiss us as "Trudeau haters" remember this: when Trudeau wanted to fast track his Trans Mountain pipeline, before he actually bought the damned thing, he gathered top officials of all relevant ministries to assess the project. Then, before they submitted their assessments, they were all gathered together in a room and told by Trudeau's envoy those independent evaluations had better support Trans Mountain. And, voila, that's just what they did. That's not just a stacked regulator, that's a stacked PMO and it's stacked against us and our coast.

The Funny Thing Is - It's Here and What Have We Done to Adapt to It?

You might not have seen video of the dramatic flash flooding that swept the historic town centre of Elliott City, Maryland, but that doesn't matter. Perhaps you didn't see the devastation of New York City and the Jersey Shore by Hurricane Sandy. Maybe you've been in a coma for the last decade and more.

Most of us, at least most of the sentient population, have experienced powerful yet "early onset" impacts of climate change. "Global Weirding" is one example. Spring weather conditions in the midst of winter. Floods and droughts. Coastal erosion. The ever poleward migration of species - birds, mammals, fish, insects, even viruses. There are shared or common impacts and others that are regional or even local, sometimes the result of topography.

Our government tells us it has a plan. It's going to introduce carbon pricing that should encourage a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions of some order by some future date, perhaps 10, certainly not more than 20 years from the date of implementation, if ever. As Catherine McKenna so fecklessly reminds us, this is a "national unity" issue first and foremost.

There are two parts to this problem. One is mitigation - cutting GHG emissions in hope of forestalling the onset of climate change. The other, the one that gets so little love, is adaptation. That goes to our resilience to withstand steadily worsening climate change impacts that we're not going to be able to avert. That is "locked in" climate change, the steadily heating atmosphere that will unleash severe storm events of increasing frequency, severity and duration. It's the sort of thing that promotes a category 3 hurricane to a full blown category 5 monster.

There are ways to blunt nature's worsening weather wedgies but they're not cheap. Some sea level rise can be contained, for a while, by constructing stronger and higher sea walls in suitable areas. Major cities can construct major floodways along the lines of the Red River Floodway, "Duff's Ditch," that Manitoba premier Roblin built in the 60s to protect Winnipeg. We know that Calgary could sure use one or more of those, Toronto too. Then there's the restoration and replacement of essential infrastructure that was engineered and constructed to meet the gentler climate demands of a time now past.

Here's one thing we know. Fixing this problem will never be cheaper than it is right now. It might have been cheaper yet if we had only started ten years ago but that is spilt milk at this point. We know it will be vastly more costly, adding in economic loss and disruption, if we keep putting this off much longer. So what's the hold up?

What's going on in your region? Are they building the road networks of the future? Are they reinforcing your bridges and overpasses? Anyone upgrading your water mains and sewers? How about your already wobbly electrical grid? Getting a new one of those? Is your public health authority preparing for the new challenges of a new climate?

You'll recognize that your government has the problem in hand because they'll be spending tens of billions, many tens of billions of dollars on climate proofing your society.

Back in 2014, when Calgary was swamped from its most recent, once in a gazillion year floods, the World Council on Disaster Management held its annual conference in Toronto.

Dr. Saeed Mirza, emeritus professor at Montreal’s McGill University specializing in structural engineering, added that the monumental infrastructure costs accumulated over decades of negligence have left Canada particularly vulnerable to catastrophic events. 

“The frequency and intensity of these events has been increasing at an escalating rate and what was a one-in-100-year event at one time may become the norm,” he said. 

“When we look at Calgary, we had a flood there in 2005 and they called it a one-in-100-year flood, while this one according to some descriptions in the news has been three times as bad.” 

Mirza estimated that Canada’s infrastructure requirements have reached a cost of about $1 trillion, while a recent survey by the McKinsey Global Institute earlier this year stated that worldwide infrastructure needs are about $57 trillion.

Now there's a handsome number, 57 trillion dollars to meet the world's essential infrastructure needs. Boy have we been robbing Peter to cut taxes for Paul!

Here's another number, one that our politicians have foremost in their minds. It's 27 trillion dollars. That's roughly the value of proven fossil fuel reserves already subscribed on global stock markets and bourses.  That number keeps our politicos tossing in their beds at night because they know if the carbon bubble bursts, most of that wealth simply evaporates causing no end of fiscal mayhem to banks, institutional investors, pension plans and, yes, government treasuries. No wonder these little shits love their pipelines so much.

Canada's approach? Oh, we'll throw 30, maybe 35 billion at the problem over 5 years. Maybe we can cook up some sweetheart deals to get the private sector to come up with another 50, maybe 60 billion that they can then fleece back from the public together with interest and hefty profits.

Here's the problem. 30 billion dollars, that's a political number that is not connected in any way to the enormity of the problem. It's just whatever they pulled out of their backsides. That much was clear when, in March of this year, a joint audit by the federal environment commissioner and the auditors general of nine provinces found that the premiers and your prime minister don't have a clue.

Neither the federal government nor the provinces have adequately assessed the risks a changing climate poses to the country and have no real idea what might be needed to adapt to it, concludes a scathing new audit released Tuesday. 

...It says while many governments have high-level goals to cut emissions, few have detailed plans to actually reach those goals, such as timelines, funding or expected results from specific actions. 

Assessments to adapt to the risks posed by climate change have been haphazard, inconsistent and lacking in detail, with no timeline for action and no funding, the report notes. 

It also calls Canada’s emissions goals a hodgepodge of different targets, with no consistency in how emissions are measured or whether cuts will target overall greenhouse gas outputs or just those from specific economic sectors. Only two provinces and Ottawa have actually laid out their specific 2030 emissions targets, and none are on track to meet them, Gelfand said.

Dame Cathy disingenuously steered the audit into mitigation and well clear of adaptation. Then again, she would.

“The previous government did nothing for a decade, but we’re 100 per cent committed to our target,” McKenna said. “Hard things are hard, we have a plan and we’re already seeing measurable results.”

That sounds just like what Harper used to say about Chretien - all talk, no meaningful action.  The problem didn't begin with Harper, dearie.

There's something telling that Cathy didn't even address adaptation. What it tells me is that I and you, we, and our kids and grandkids are pretty much on our own as far as this government, like its predecessors, is concerned.

What that means is that we're getting "behind the power curve" on climate change adaptation which means it will become increasingly more costly and more difficult to deal with as their dereliction mounts, year by year. Unless something changes, we're in for a hard landing.

A Question Worth Asking - Has Canada Been Captured?

As analysis and reports stack up laying bare how much we know and everything we don't know about dilbit and Kinder Morgan's Trans Mountain pipeline, it is looking like this has nothing to do with the "national interest" as claimed by prime minister Trudeau. Instead it looks as though Trudeau is in service to some rather powerful special interests.  Who is he serving?

An article in The Tyee suggests that perhaps we're seeing the face of Canada's own Deep State, the Fossil Fuelers.

It all began with a Greenpeace energy researcher and a bundle of freedom of information documents he received that somehow had briefing notes for Andrew Leslie, parliamentary secretary to Christia Freeland. One set was for a meeting Leslie had with the CEO of a major pipeline company. The other was for a meeting between Leslie and officials of the oil patch lobby, the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers.

...the briefing notes revealed that while Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s Liberal government was presenting itself publicly as a stalwart defender of all things Canadian against the bullying new regime south of the border — on the environment, trade and NAFTA especially — in this instance there was celebration of the fact that Donald Trump and his administration were pro-oil and pro-pipelines.
In particular, they expressed delight over the U.S. president’s decision to approve building the Keystone XL (KXL) pipeline, which TransCanada is constructing, overturning Barack Obama’s rejection of the project. 

“We support TransCanada’s KXL project and efforts to expand its market in North America” was one of the notes’ talking points Leslie was given, consistent with the government’s public position on the pipeline. The briefing notes omitted any hint that climate change was on the agenda — and CAPP confirms the topic was not discussed during its meeting with Leslie. TransCanada and Leslie refused to respond to questions about these meetings.

For years Stewart has seen this sort of language in internal government memos, with cabinet ministers, MPs and civil servants seeing themselves as allies and partners of the energy industry. 

It’s one reason Stewart believes the oil industry constitutes a so-called “deep state” in Canada. 

“When we’re talking about a ‘deep state,’ it’s usually when supposedly democratic institutions and the will of the people is being replaced by the will of special interests,” he observes. “And I think if you look at the development of environmental policy in this country, the oil industry is so powerful, their influence is so pervasive that I think it’s fair to call it a deep state.”

...to academics, deep state is another way to refer to governments that have been captured by corporate or military/intelligence interests, or both. 

“Captured state is a term political scientists have used for a very long time to characterize the relationship in which the government is essentially under the influence of the dominant sector of the economy,” explains Laurie Adkin, a political scientist at the University of Alberta. 

Has the federal government — along with certain provincial governments — been captured by Canada’s energy sector? 

Kevin Taft, a former leader of Alberta’s Liberal Party (2004-08) believes so. He’s the author of a new book, Oil’s Deep State. “In Canada, the fossil fuel industry has captured really key democratic institutions and in some ways has captured so many of them that it has formed what I call a deep state,” explains Taft. “So democracy stops functioning for the people and begins to function first and foremost for the fossil fuel industry.” 

Those who believe the oil industry has become a deep state point to how the political elites, whether Liberal, Conservative or NDP — from Justin Trudeau to Stephen Harper to Rachel Notley — go to bat for the industry, even if it means Canada’s greenhouse gas emissions rise and jobs are needlessly lost. Or how Canada has never forced the oil industry to curb emissions — even as the impacts of global warming become more catastrophic. And why Canada is highly unlikely to reach its targets under the Paris climate agreement.

...Deep states ...emerge in countries that are democracies. “With a captured state, there is a strong heritage of democracy,” notes Taft. A deep state occurs when numerous government departments and regulators are captured and serve specific corporate interests at the expense of public interests. “When that happens, you end up with the appearance of democracy but really you have a state within a state,” says Taft.

...it affects all political parties, no matter whether they’re on the left or right. Hence, elections become less relevant as political parties who win office eventually succumb to the fact so many government agencies are captured.

Oil sand development was largely created by government fiat. After Peter Lougheed became Alberta’s premier in 1971, the sole oil sands operation, Suncor Energy, was producing a mere 30,000 barrels a day. Now the oil sands produce 2.5 million barrels a day. 

While Lougheed encouraged development of the oil sands, he took an interventionist approach with industry, making the oil companies abide by laws, regulators and legislators. When the industry boomed in the mid-’70s, Lougheed raised royalty rates, while the federal government hit it with taxes. 

But by 1993, the balance of power was shifting. Both Premier Ralph Klein in Alberta and Prime Minister Jean Chrétien were desperate to ramp up oil sands production to boost the economy. In return, the oil industry wanted less regulation, oversight and taxation. 

Chrétien and Klein obliged. Royalties were dropped to one per cent and taxes rolled back, while environmental regulations were weakened. 

“From then on, oil sands projects would have fewer standards of accountability to democratic institutions and more accountability to investors,” says Taft. “The system of governing and managing the publicly-owned oil sands had been captured by private interests.” 

The industry boomed. By 2015, one quarter of all business investment in Canada was going to the energy sector, while oil and gas topped Canada’s exports.

The Harper Era.

The impact of this lobbying was visible when Harper was in office. From 2008 to 2012, 27 oil companies and eight industry associations registered 2,733 meetings with federal government officials. During this time, the Harper government withdrew Canada from the Kyoto climate accord, government scientists were discouraged from doing climate science and barred from speaking to the media, while the RCMP, CSIS and Canada Revenue Agency were tasked to spy on and audit groups and activists opposed to pipelines and the tar sands. 

But the coup de grâce were two omnibus bills Harper rammed through Parliament in 2012 that gutted Canada’s environmental laws, most notably the Fisheries Act and Navigable Waters Protection Act, which were viewed as impediments for building oil pipelines.

Think Tanks - Captured

The most famous is the Vancouver-based Fraser Institute, which has received funding from the U.S. oil billionaire Koch brothers and long campaigned in favour of the oil sands and pipelines while opposing climate change measures. Its staff produce a relentless stream of oped pieces for newspapers across the country. 

Canada 2020, the Ottawa-based “progressive think tank” closely allied with Trudeau, has been instrumental in shaping the Liberals. It lets industry leaders and lobbyists rub elbows with cabinet ministers and senior government officials. Among the corporate “partners” of Canada 2020 are CAPP and oil industry giants Shell, Suncor and Enbridge. 

The influence of think tanks is not to be minimized: representatives from Canada’s 10 leading think tanks appeared at least 216 times before parliamentary committees between 2000 and 2015 and were cited in the Canadian media almost 60,000 times. “It gave them and their research priceless exposure and influence in shaping government policy,” noted the Globe and Mail in December.

The Media - Captured

The oil industry advertises heavily in newspapers, on television and online. In 2013, CAPP and the Postmedia newspaper chain struck a deal whereby the media company promised to further the industry’s interests. The Postmedia papers are famous for championing the energy sector while belittling the environmental movement. A study published in 2013 by University of British Columbia and Memorial University researchers found that the Globe and Mail and National Post were failing to provide readers with a complete picture of global warming issues and underemphasizing the impacts.

Academia - Captured

The oil industry also pours millions into universities — in particular in Alberta. The University of Calgary has been beset by scandals in this regard. 

In 2011, one of its political scientists, Barry Cooper, was discovered to have transferred research funds to a climate change denial group called Friends of Science. (Cooper was also a long-time columnist with the Calgary Herald, where he poured relentless scorn on the environmental movement and any opponents of the oil sands.) 

But the topper was the Bruce Carson scandal. The federal government spent $40 million to finance a University of Calgary think tank chaired by Carson, a former senior advisor to Harper and a convicted fraudster. The institute worked with the industry on a plan to rebrand the oil sands as responsible and sustainable, and Carson co-ordinated some of his activities with CAPP. 

In 2016, Carson was found guilty of violating lobbying laws in connection with his work at the University of Calgary and fined $50,000.

Canada's Regulatory Agencies - Captured

Some critics believe key elements of the federal bureaucracy are under the industry’s sway — in particular Natural Resources Canada (NRCAN) and Environment and Climate Change Canada. 

“I think NRCAN has become the Department of Oil and Gas and I think Environment Canada was converted under Harper from a public service agency to a corporate concierge service to speed along the approval of oil sands projects,” says [Elizabeth] May. 

In 2015, after the Liberal government was elected, Jim Carr, the new natural resources minister, appointed Janet Annesley as his chief of staff. Annesley had spent five years working for CAPP as a vice-president, and nine years at Shell Oil before that. (Annesley was replaced earlier last year by Zoë Caron, a long-time environmental activist). 

When Catherine McKenna became environment minister, her deputy minister was Michael Martin, who had been appointed by the Harper government as chief climate negotiator for the 2009 Copenhagen climate summit, which set no firm targets for reducing greenhouse emissions.

May feels Martin pressed the Liberals to stick with the former government’s target. “There was a shift and suddenly Harper’s target was Trudeau’s target.” 

But it’s not just the federal government. Last year, internal B.C. government documents [Christy Clark's Liberals] were unearthed that revealed the province’s climate plan unveiled in 2016 had been secretly drafted jointly with CAPP and its members — in part at CAPP’s offices in Calgary.

The Crown Jewel - Captured

Then there is the National Energy Board (NEB), which has the task of reviewing things like pipeline applications. 

In recent years, the board has been accused of being heavily biased in favour of the oil industry. In 2015, for example, NEB board members met privately with Jean Charest, a former Quebec premier, who was a lobbyist for the pipeline company, TransCanada. This led to the resignation of NEB panel members when the meeting was exposed the following year. 

The NEB is also accused of not upholding the public interest when it comes to pipelines. Unifor, a trade union that represents nearly 12,000 workers in the oil industry, is opposed to pipelines designed to ship raw bitumen out of Canada, arguing it should be refined and upgraded in Canada. Over the past 30 years, nearly 20 refineries have been shuttered in Canada. 

Unifor has argued before the NEB that it should stop this trend. In a brief presented to the NEB in 2016, the union noted that by exporting raw bitumen “Canada will forego the enormous economic and employment benefits of adding value to Canadian resources through upgrading, refining, and secondary manufacturing. Not only does the bitumen export model undermine investment in value-added production over the long term, it actually threatens the security of supply to existing Canadian refineries… Incredibly, in 2014 Canada actually became a net importer of refined petroleum products: with imports of product now more than offsetting our own exports.”

The Biggest Capture of Them All - Justin Trudeau - Captured

As I argued recently, with Trudeau, just like Trump, you have to judge this prime minister by his deeds, not his words. All too often one has no relation to the other.

At the Paris climate talks his government pushed for a higher-than-expected goal — holding the planet’s rise in temperature to 1.5 degrees Celsius rather than two degrees. Trudeau also announced a plan to reduce methane emissions by up to 45 per cent from 2012 levels within the next seven years. 

But Trudeau has also undermined those goals by supporting three pipelines the industry desperately wants — Kinder Morgan, Enbridge Line 3 and Keystone XL. He also approved the $11.4-billion Pacific NorthWest LNG project to convert fracked gas in B.C. 

Prior to the election, Trudeau had promised to cut $1.6 billion in federal subsidies to the oil industry. More than two years later, this has still not happened. While recommendations to overhaul the NEB have been made, they’ve not been implemented. And the environmental laws Harper gutted have not been reinstated, although are under review.

Even the promised carbon tax on industry has been altered to give big breaks to industrial emitters like the oil and gas sector. And regulations on methane emissions have also been delayed. 

Most crucially, Trudeau has refused to place limits on the oil and gas sector’s greenhouse emissions. 

“If you take a look at the climate plan that Canada articulated… it lays out very aggressive and ambitious plan for decarbonizing the nation,” says Abreu of Climate Action Network. “It impacts almost every sector of the Canadian economy — except the fossil fuel sector.”

A Government Wearing Petro-Blinders

Canada’s capture by the oil and gas industry’s deep state is proving ill-timed. 

“The harsh reality is that global warming is real,” says Kevin Taft. “And while much of the rest of the world is moving aggressively away from fossil fuels, Canada is going to get left behind in that transformation if we’re not really careful.”

The Tyee article provides a wonderful backdrop to help make sense of the Trudeau government's energy policy so riddled with contradictions, inconsistencies, outright falsehoods and, ultimately, cognitive dissonance.

It makes sense of the radical transformation from Trudeau 2015 to Trudeau 2018. Liberals, I'm sorry but your boy has been processed, remanufactured, and reissued to someone's liking - just not Canada's.

I've Got an Idea to Rescue Justin From His Slump

Unfair or not, Justin Trudeau has taken a hit in the public's mind over his pretty clumsy trip to India. With JT et famille sporting an elaborate wardrobe of Bollywood's best fashions, the Indian press took the piss out of him pretty relentlessly. The local scribblers piled on.

Now Trudeau's approval numbers have dropped to within spitting distance of Tory leader, Andrew Scheer's. That's Andrew "Chuckles" Scheer people, a guy with all the charisma of a recycled catheter.

Maybe JT should consider upping his game. He could start by reversing himself and honouring a major campaign promise - electoral reform. I would like it even better if he went for electoral reform and pipelines but that's probably too much to ask. 

Trudeau promised that 2015 would be our last first-past-the-post election. In short order he reneged on that committment but his "can't" sounded more like "won't."  His claim that it wouldn't work here, even though it works elsewhere, was utterly unconvincing. We would even accept the preferential ballot option if he insisted. Just do it.

Or maybe Justin can change course. Maybe he should transform himself from just another free trade mule into a Renaissance Man befitting of his legendary father. (full disclosure. what follows is taken from an email I wrote to a fellow blogger this morning)

I have long argued that Canada needs some serious redecorating. Ever since George H.W. Bush started this “coalition of the willing” business, America has treated certain allies, Canada included, as its de facto Foreign Legion.  Desert Storm was, arguably, a good cause – driving Iraq out of Kuwait. Kosovo – meh. Afghanistan, well we all lost our minds at the 9/11 attacks streamed live into our livingrooms. We even bent the rules around Article 5 in that, 1) – the US never attacked by Afghanistan, and 2) – at the time the US invoked Article 5 it was not truly “under attack.” Picky, picky.

Where we lost the plot was when Bush/Cheney decided America should turn to invading Iraq rather than finishing what it had begun in Afghanistan. We knew from Hans Blix and his team of UN inspectors that Saddam wasn’t hiding a mountain of WMDs. It was pretty obvious that Washington thought it could roll in and basically grab the oil for US energy giants. Why was the only Iraqi ministry US forces secured the oil ministry?

The US decided to offload much of the Afghan mission to free up troops for Iraq and wanted a Foreign Legion. Rick “Big Cod” Hillier talked Paul Martin into taking the combat gig in Kandahar with a laughably token force of just 2,000 personnel, no more than half combat ready, to a province whose area and population mandated a combat force of between 20 to 30,000.  Martin didn’t know any better. Hillier probably did know, definitely should have known , but obviously didn’t tell his prime minister. It’s right there in the US Army/Marine Corps field manual, FM-3/24.

We lost our war in Afghanistan, the first military defeat in Canadian history. We lost badly. War is a state of armed conflict used to achieve a political outcome. That sought outcome was defined by Stephen Harper. We were there to stay. We would never cut and run. We would stay until the Taliban had been vanquished, effectively eradicated. We would make Afghanistan safe for democracy and a restoration of human rights (as they had once enjoyed under the country’s last king). We did none of those things. The Talibs are resurgent. The government is a hopelessly corrupt amalgamation of warlords from five main ethnic groups. Little boys’ bums are all the rage again and the struggle for women’s rights languishes. Meanwhile we definitely chose to cut and run.

Then along came Libya, a not so tidy war that Obama basically offloaded on Europe. Harper staged a victory fly past over Parliament Hill for that one even as Libya itself descended into an intractable, second phase civil war, this one substituting Islamist radicals for Gadhafi.

Syria? ISIS has been driven out, more or less, for now. It has been reduced from a rebellion to an insurgency to what is today essentially a terrorist movement. That’s the thing with these guys. They can morph from one state to another, often rather effortlessly, and that enables them to be flexible, mobile. They’ll be back, probably in another guise.

I have gone on at some length on these events because the world has become no safer for all of our post 9/11 misadventures. If anything we’ve demonstrated, repeatedly, that all the King’s Horses and all the King’s Men are no longer a sure path to a meaningful, lasting victory. We have all the watches but the bad guys have all the time.

We are returning to a more challenging era, one akin to the last Cold War, another win that we utterly failed to consolidate as we allowed triumphalism to get the better of us. That Doomsday Clock is now closer to midnight than it has been since the Cuban missile crisis. Around the world but particularly in Europe, Eurasia, South Asia, Southeast Asia, the greater Asia Pacific region all the way to Australia, Russia and China, everyone is madly rearming.

America is being overtaken, economically, by China which is fast making inroads into the Middle East, Africa and even South America (whatever happened to the Monroe Doctrine anyway?). We have seen a number of these major power transitions over the centuries. At various times in the modern period the dominant spot belonged alternately to the Spanish, the French, the Dutch, the Brits and now the Americans. Before that came the Greeks, the Romans, the Mongols, etc.

Here’s the thing. History tells us that these transitions tend to be difficult. Two-thirds of them result in war. Is war in the offing between the U.S. and China? From what I’ve read over the past ten years, China’s military leadership is quietly bellicose.  At some level they want to exact revenge for China’s “century of humiliation” at the hands of us white folks – Opium Wars, etc.?  That thought came to mind when I found an essay in the Proceedings of the US Naval Institute wherin an acting service officer complained bitterly that China was overtaking the United States “without a fight” as though that was unthinkable.

It would be tempting to dismiss that view as the work of a hothead only his sentiments go deeper in that, all the way back to the Project for a New American Century, the neo-cons (Cheney, Rumsfeld, Feith, Perle, Wolfowitz, Libby et al)  developed an “over my dead body” policy prescription that was subsequently embodied in the Bush Doctrine. That doctrine provided that America reserved the right to institute pre-emptive war against any nation or group of nations that challenged America’s economic and military domination.  Seriously, look it up.

The backbone of American airpower today and into the future are its stealth warplanes, the F-22 and F-35. Those are not dual purpose aircraft. They’re not defence oriented. There are simply too few F-22s to handle the job and the F-35 has a series of deficiencies that make it marginal in the air defence role. They are primarily offensive weapons designed to “take the fight to the enemy” and not just any garden variety enemy either.  They are purpose built to operate in heavily defended, hostile airspace.  One American general called the F-35 his “kick in the front door” weapon. Do you remember that the Japanese ran a dress rehearsal of their Pearl Harbour attack to test their shallow-draught Long Lance torpedoes in an appropriate anchorage? The USAF staged a similar “proof of concept” exercise called Operation Chimichanga that simulated a stealth first strike attack on China. Do you the Chinese maybe didn’t hear about that?

Whether it’s North Korea or the South China Sea or maybe just two countries getting into each other’s faces, this is not a very placid time. For Canada, however, it may be a time to begin loosening the ties that bind us to American foreign and military policy, perhaps by aligning Canadian  policy more directly with our western European allies. It doesn’t mean we won’t pick up the phone when Washington calls but maybe just not on the first or even the twenty-first ring.

If you follow this global rearmament business as I do you’re drawn to the conclusion that the world has absolutely no shortage of state of the art weaponry. State of the art everything. Hell even the city state of Singapore has six modern and very capable submarines.

How about we zig where everyone else chooses to zag by decoupling ourselves from Washington and restoring our credibility as an honest broker nation? Communications between rival nations (at all levels) are apt to become more strained in this overheated and armed-to-the-teeth milieu that has become our new reality. The need for a trustworthy intermediary may be greater now than ever before in Canadian history. It's a job suitable for the nation that gave the world the concept of peacekeeping, an initiative that earned Mike Pearson the Nobel Peace Prize.

How Nigel Wright Got a Pass

It's an interesting story but hardly convincing. When the RCMP went after senator Mike Duffy for supposed bribery it left people shaking their heads. How could Duffy have committed the crime of bribery for receiving Nigel Wright's $90-thousand without Wright being criminally responsible for giving the bribe? It became known as the "immaculate bribe."

Newly released documents show the RCMP gave Wright "a pass"  in order to secure Harper's ex-chief of staff's testimony against Duffy. They let the little fish go in order to catch the big fish.

Two things wrong with this story. In the months between Wright's resignation turned firing (remember how Harper changed his story on that?) and the RCMP announcement that he would not be charged, supposedly because he'd done nothing wrong, I kept getting word from a well placed Ottawa conservative that Wright was making the rounds socially and telling the conservative fold that, if he was charged, he would tell all. The message , I'm told, was that he would implicate Harper as not merely knowing everything but as the directing, and hence criminal, mind. The "bribe" was all about making a political problem go away.

Wright hung around Ottawa those several months basically doing nothing but waiting for the "all clear" from the RCMP. Literally the day after he was taken off the hook, he headed for the airport.

Here's something to remember. You can't make sense of this scandal without recalling how it broke in the first place. It began with an incredibly foolish email Duffy sent to his inner circle (seemingly half of Ottawa) about the deal that had been cooked up in the PMO. It unveiled all the essential elements of the deal. Duffy would be given cash to square away his Senate debt. But there was more. He was to immediately cease cooperating with the Senate auditors. And the PMO would see to it that the Senate audit report "went easy on" old Duff.

Duffy's email was sent contemporaneously with the deal. It's the marker. Afterward each and every element of the deal came to pass. It was only well after the plan was implemented that someone leaked the email to CTV's Bob Fife. That critical email did not evidence some bribe. There was no scheme hatched by Duffy. The scheme, quite plainly, was the doing of the PMO - Wright and Harper. Remember these are the RCMP's top investigators and the commissioner who supposedly were blinded to the obvious.

The second problem is that, as Justice Vaillancourt observed, Duffy wasn't bribed at all. Duffy was ordered to take the money, pay off his Senate tab, and make the story die. But Vaillancourt went further. He said that a crime had indeed been perpetrated, just not by Duffy.

Remember that Duffy was acquitted of all 31 charges brought against him. The very number is astonishing. 31 charges, all of them groundless? 31 acquittals, that's not a matter of misjudgment or oversight. That's a political persecution, a deliberate effort to bury the guy. That's what Harper had said they would do if Duffy didn't play ball. And the RCMP were in on it. They had to be.

Wright was taken off the hook because he had to be. When he was off the hook so too were the prime minister, the Senate leadership, and everyone else in the PMO. The RCMP didn't do it gracefully. It was extraordinarily clumsy. They had to invent a new crime, the immaculate bribe. But it staunched the bleeding within the PMO, the Senate leadership and the Tory party. God save the King.

We're All Neoliberals Now. Let's Change That.

One thing that struck home during our extended election campaign was how our mainstream political parties have become deeply invested in neoliberalism. While it has several descriptions, reflective of its insidious vagueness, neoliberalism is the merger of political and economic ideology most often called "free market fundamentalism." It is a sort of merger of political and commercial/corporate powers usually born out of the surrender of incidents of political sovereignty through multi-national financial and trade agreements.

It's a process akin to the tactics of a boa constrictor whose victims often fail to realize the severity of their predicament until its too late. That's an apt analogy for how we have, for decades, been conditioned to our role as prey.

Neoliberals have been very successful in conditioning a large segment of the electorate to see themselves as 'taxpayers' rather than 'citizens,' a feat that isolates them from public debate beyond how government impacts their wallets and readies them to accept 'transactional democracy,' where money dictates policy for the powerful often at the expense of everyone else.

Nobel laureate economist, Joe Stiglitz, explores legislated inequality in his book, "The Price of Inequality." Modern inequality, he explains, is neither market nor merit-based to any significant degree. It is legislated and comes in a plethora of forms from tax treatment (exemptions, reductions, deferrals), to grants and subsidies, to the transfer of public resources at far less than market value. The 'taxpayer' public is particularly blind to these government giveaway programmes having been groomed to venerate the rich as the "job creators" whose success "trickles down" to the masses. In reality cooperative lawmakers ensure that the nation's wealth actually "trickles up" to those who least deserve it. It is a malignancy known as "rent-seeking."

Another triumph of neoliberalism has been in conditioning working class Canadians, white and blue collar, to support capital over labour and acquiesce to the decline of unionism. For all the legitimate criticisms of the union movement, it has been freely demonized by the neoliberals and their political minions as regressive and an economic scourge. We've lost sight of the role unions play as the cornerstone of a healthy, robust middle class, the ladder of social mobility, and a vehicle to maintain the balance between labour and capital without which inequality flourishes.

We have been conditioned, groomed, to be submissive to neoliberalism, powerless, incapable even of rallying to our own defence. Harnessed to the myths and scourges of neoliberal ideology, we are clearing the path for increasing inequality and the corrosion of social cohesion and it's a road that leads to illiberal democracy and a gradual rise of economic feudalism.

The legacy of Stephen Harper will be how well he moved us down this path during his decade in power. It's a legacy he shared with his collaborators, Layton, Mulcair and Ignatieff.

It's time we charted a new path while that option is still open to us.



I strongly urge you to watch this Days of Revolt interview.

Harper's Threat to Canada's High Tech Crown Jewel

Ask most Canadians to name Canada's biggest technology success story and they'll probably be hard pressed to come up with an answer.  Blackberry? No, that's out. Hmmm.

The answer, for the time being at least, is Bombardier, the world's third largest civil aircraft manufacturer.  Sure, when you board WestJet or Air Canada you'll probably be on a Boeing or Airbus but Bombardier has been growing steadily, ambitiously developing its own mid-size C series jetliner.

Like the Big Two - Boeing and Airbus - Bombardier's development of the C series has been anything but smooth. There have been delays and cost issues, the sort of problems routinely absorbed by the competition but harder to manage for the smaller, cash-strapped Bombardier.

Now, according to Aviation Week's Kevin Michaels, the C series threatens Bombardier's survival. Bombardier's options are limited and, as Michaels notes, could hinge on whether Canadians give Stephen Harper the boot.

The first option is to sell assets. The most obvious asset is its $10 billion transportation business. Bombardier previously tried and failed to sell a minority stake of this division. Instead, it could sell the entire business and become a pure aerospace company. This might raise more than $5 billion that could see the manufacturer through the difficult period ahead and help it pay down debt. This would also address the market’s perception that Bombardier’s very survival is at risk. What about another asset—the aerostructures business? This makes sense strategically, but the value of this unit is tied to the C Series, and it won’t bring in enough capital to fund the company’s war chest. Better to sell it after the C Series program is stabilized. Finally, there might still be a buyer for the commercial aircraft business—perhaps Comac or another deep-pocketed Asian aerospace OEM such as Mitsubishi or Avic. This could bring not only capital but also much-needed customers.

Bombardier’s second option is to stop the bleeding and shut down the C Series. This option will not be cheap, as Bombardier would need to pay back suppliers for development costs, adding up to $1 billion or more. It would face customer ire, penalties and severely damaged credibility. And the move would deal an emotional blow to Canada in the wake of other high-technology failures.

Finally, there is a third option: government intervention. The interesting twist here is that that support may be tied to next week’s Canadian federal elections. Justin Trudeau’s Liberal Party has a narrow lead in recent polls, and his base of support is in Ontario and Quebec. If he wins, he may feel compelled to pay back voters, given Bombardier’s footprint in both provinces.

What about Stephen Harper’s Conservatives? If they win a majority government, it could doom federal aid, as Harper’s base of support in western Canada wouldn’t stand for a bailout of eastern interests.

Why the World's Eyes Will Be on Canada on October 19th

Next week's general election will decide whether we can restore the Rule of Law and a functional democracy to Canada. Both hinge on driving Stephen Harper out of office. Yet that's just scratching the surface of what it means to Canada and to the world to rid our country of this thug.

In the latest Foreign Policy, Jeff Dembicki writes that freeing Canada from Harper's yoke is just as critical to the world as it is to Canadians.

For years, Canada and Australia have been the climate villains the world has loved to hate. They’ve been the ones giggling in the corner at each year’s round of climate talks, trashing renewable energy, boasting about their reserves of coal and oil sands, and giving the diplomatic middle finger to serious emissions cuts. This summer a panel led by former U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan argued, “Australia and Canada appear to have withdrawn entirely from constructive international engagement on climate.” A story on the website Road to Paris by the journalist Leigh Phillips was even blunter: “They are what could be called the Bad Boys of climate change.”

Australia's prime ministerial coal scuttle, Tony Abbott, is gone, deposed by his own caucus, yet Harper remains a real threat to the 'make it or break it' climate summit in Paris this December

....though climate change has not loomed large in the election, if Harper’s Conservatives lose their ability to govern, the country would likely find itself with a profoundly different climate policy — and one that could potentially influence how world powers choose to negotiate and implement a post-2020 global climate change agreement at the COP21 summit in Paris this December.

“My feeling is there’s been a bit of a sigh of relief from the international community, at least in climate circles,” said Erwin Jackson, deputy CEO of the Climate Institute, an Australia-based think tank.

...By no means will Australia and Canada be setting the agenda at this year’s big climate talks — that’s for major powers like the United States, China, and the European Union. But as fossil fuel-producing middle powers, Canada and Australia have a significant role to play, argues Jackson, who has over 20 years of experience working on climate policy. “It’s in the ideas space that they’re really important,” he said.

Many developing countries are convinced that the only way they can become affluent is by burning fossil fuels. Although India recently promised to get 40 percent of its power from renewable sources by 2030, coal-fired power capacity is growing by 9.4 percent each year. And the country’s power minister, Piyush Goyal, claimed that “development imperatives cannot be sacrificed at the altar of potential climate changes many years in the future,” when asked in 2014 about India’s appetite for fossil fuels. Similarly, China has promised to cap its carbon emissions by 2030 while at the same time consuming more coal than the rest of the world combined.

But if Canada and Australia can prove to the world at Paris that they’re now willing and able to work with the global community to reduce their emissions to safe levels, while at the same time making coal and oil sands a less important contributor to their GDPs, Jackson argued, “that will give confidence to other resource-based economies in the developing world that they can do the same.”

The timing for such a scenario is perfect. They world is now adding more renewable energy capacity (143 gigawatts in 2013) than oil, coal, and gas combined (141 gigawatts the same year). Over half the world’s coal reserves aren’t profitable to extract at today’s prices, Moody’s Investors Service has estimated. And in 2014 the global economy grew while emissions stayed flat, the first time it has done so in 40 years, according to the International Energy Agency. The goal in Paris is to negotiate an international climate treaty capable of accelerating all this momentum. “[It’s about] sending a signal to investors that we’re all on one train and it’s heading in one direction,” Jackson said. “So you need to realign your investment decisions on that basis.”

Canada has not been sending that signal under Harper, who has been in power since 2006. The country may miss its 2020 climate target by 20 percent, a result primarily of increased oil and gas production, an Environment Canada report submitted to the U.N. this spring suggested. Canada’s fossil fuel-dominated energy sector is worth more to the national economy — it’s about 10 percent of GDP — than retail, construction, agriculture, and the public sector combined. A new government in Ottawa wouldn’t have much time to change the country’s course, but a sincere and dedicated effort to do so might communicate a powerful message to the international community.

Simply getting rid of Harper won't be enough. The next prime minister, be it Mulcair or Trudeau, needs to get Canadians to re-think our petro-statehood. We have to change course on high-carbon fossil fuels. Right now both opposition leaders, while lacking Harper's hydrocarbon malevolence, back bitumen extraction, transportation and export. It's going to take immense courage and vision to change that and we won't know until well after the votes are counted if either man has that strength or conviction. All we know for sure is that one man, the current prime minister, plainly doesn't.

“Harper and Abbott tapped into people’s very real fears of losing their jobs,” Phillips, who writes about European affairs and climate for outlets like Nature and theGuardian, said in an interview.

Those fears are an impediment to action, especially for efforts to negotiate a binding climate treaty among the world’s 196 nations. All it takes is a few loud dissenters to slow down the entire process. That’s the role performed by coal-dependent Poland within the European Union. Internationally, developing countries like India have made legitimate claims that their economic growth isn’t possible without burning fossil fuels. What incentive do they have to reduce their dependence on coal, gas, and oil if “bad boys” such as Canada and Australia refuse to do the same? “Those divisions are the big blocks toward achieving an international consensus,” said Phillips.

So What's Our Excuse?

Amnesty International is urging Britain's Cameron government to stop arms shipments to Saudi Arabia.  Amnesty claims the weapons are being used to deliberately slaughter civilians in Houthi-rebel controlled parts of Yemen.

Amnesty said it found a pattern of “appalling disregard” for civilian lives by the Saudi-led coalition in an investigation of 13 air strikes in north-eastern Saada governorate during May, June and July: these killed some 100 civilians – including 59 children and 22 women and injured a further 56, including 18 children.

Since last March coalition air strikes have hit homes, schools, markets and other civilian infrastructure, as well as miltiary objectives. Saada, a Houthi stronghold, has been badly hit. Thousands who remain in the governorate “live in constant fear of the airstrikes and dire humanitarian conditions”, Amnesty says.

Canada is also on the Saudi weapons of indiscriminate destruction/war crimes gravy train with Harper having inked a $15-billion deal for the sale of light armoured fighting vehicles (light tanks) presumably for democracy suppression patrols. The deal supposedly gags Harper from discussing (having to explain) the sale but seemingly leaves him quite free to excuse it on the basis that, if we didn't sell Saudis its instruments of carnage then some other nation would.

For the radical Sunni Muslim House of Saud, being a Shiite Muslim is enough to qualify you for live-fire target practice.  Fortunately, that exempts the devoutly Sunni al Qaeda, al Nusra and ISIS terrorists/insurgents from Saudi bloodlust. Yemen's Houthi rebels daily fight ISIS and al Qaeda forces while the Saudis, with the active support of Canada, Britain and the US, wage a ground and air war against the Houthis.

If you're interested in this curious murderous mess, check out this episode of VICE TV. The Houthi segment begins at the 17:00 minute mark. It's an eye-opener.



Keeping with the theme of "So What's Our Excuse?" let's talk bitumen and the armada of supertankers that may soon ply British Columbia's coast.  Roger Annis has written an important report, "The Canadian Election and the Global Climate Crisis," for CounterPunch that should be required reading for every British Columbian before they vote in the federal election.  The only party that's even partly standing up for this province and our incredibly fragile ecosystems is Elizabeth May's Green Party and even May is a bit wobbly on bitumen trafficking.

Which brings us to the first segment of the VICE TV episode above concerning the BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill catastrophe in the Gulf of Mexico and how BP used a highly toxic chemical, Corexit, that, instead of dispersing the oil as promised simply made it far more lethal and sank it to contaminate the bottom and the marine life that is found there. Watch it. It's a genuine call to arms.

h/t Northern PoV

For Harper, It's Showtime - the Sequel. Fremdschamen, Indeed.

Okay, it's not Mike Duffy. We won't hear much of him again until the election is over.

Today's fare is more like a light lunch, maybe just a handful of trail mix. It's Bruce Carson time!

The two-time jailbird, fraudster and, naturally, top Harper aide goes back to his old stomping grounds today, the prisoner's box in an Ottawa criminal court, to stand trial for influence peddling in connection with a scheme to flog water filtration gear to First Nations reserves.

Carson raises memories of Harper's standard modus operandi when he's been caught out with dirty hands. It goes like this. He begins with a floater lie. If that works, fine. If it doesn't sell, he backpeddles - a bit. He tosses in a glimmer of truth. If that flops he backpeddles again, adding a little more truth. Eventually the whole thing comes to a dreary end, the scandal deflates and Harper skulks away into the shadows.

When the Carson scandal erupted it began with questions about how a guy, twice imprisoned for fraud, could be allowed into Harper's inner sanctum, the Prime Minister's Office. Harper's first response was "who knew?" If he'd only known there was no way an ex-con like Carson would have been allowed to set foot in the hallowed PMO. Then he began pointing fingers at the Privy Council or the RCMP for letting him down, failing to properly vet Carson, dropping the ball. (Remember, the RCMP back then was being run by a veteran Tory backroom boy, Bill Elliott). Finally Harper had to admit that, well, he'd known just a little bit of Carson's sordid past but he thought the guy deserved a second chance and so he took Bad Bruce in. But, if he'd known the guy's full record, he would have never, ever, not ever let him in.

It's the standard tale. A layer of bullshit reinforced with another layer of bullshit and finally smothered in an even thicker layer of bullshit.

The thing is, even Harper's lies were irreconcilable. No one asked why he lied to us when he first said that no one knew. You would have thought when he finally admitted to having known about at least some of Carson's record, someone would have asked why he denied it at the start. No one ever seemed to ask why those responsible for vetting Carson didn't send up flares or, indeed, whether they had. No one asked whether Harper derailed the entire vetting process to get his preferred guy into the PMO. It's not hard to run a criminal records check and, in Carson's case, it would have triggered all the alarms.

Here's the thing. Ottawa is literally bursting at the seams with veteran, lifelong Tory insiders, guys who've been with the party as far back as Diefenbaker and Stanfield. I know some of them. They all get together. They socialize. They lunch. They frequent the same clubs. I know a few of these guys. One of them told me that he and two others I know were alarmed when they got word that Carson was being hired and they each got ahold of senior Harper aides and said don't hire this guy, he's bent, he's a crook.

Harper didn't need the RCMP to vet Carson. He didn't need the Privy Council to vet Carson. The PMO switchboard was flooded with calls. That's all he needed. He knew everything there was to know about Bruce Carson, serial jailbird. With that public record knowledge only one person could have brought Carson in to the PMO, his accomplice, the PM himself.

Which brings me to a pair of letters in today's TorStar from Bob Walsh of Connecticut and Margaret Perrault of North Bay. Do you see a pattern here?


PM insists Wright alone was to blame, Sept. 8

So, Prime Minister Stephen Harper insists that Nigel Wright was alone to blame for the Duffy affair. As Adam blamed Eve, Richard Nixon blamed John Dean, Bill Clinton blamed “that woman,” now Stephen Harper blames Nigel Wright.

Great theatre but it is unclear whether it is a comedy or a tragedy.

Mr. Harper has cemented a legacy for himself as believing Canadians are idiots. Mr. Wright has created a legacy as one of the great dupes in Canadian political history.

The Germans have a word for what we feel about this, fremdschämen: to be embarrassed because someone else has embarrassed himself, and doesn’t notice.

Bob Walsh, Wilton, CT

If Stephen Harper was so angry when he learned about the secret plan concocted by Nigel Wright alone, as he claimed on his interview with Peter Mansbridge, why did he so vigorously defend the action for several days, following the media report of this story?

Why would he dispatch Pierre Polievre to the political talk shows to make the case repeatedly that Mr. Wright was really such a Good Samaritan, paying this money out of his own pocket, and saving the taxpayers the bill in the process?

It also begs the question that if, Mr. Harper was so angry about Mr. Wright’s plan, does a good luck call to him about his new position seem like something this Prime Minister would do, for someone who had allegedly crossed him.

Margaret Perrault, North Bay

Stephen Harper's Oily Comeuppance

A Saudi prince once said that the Stone Age didn't end because man ran out of stones.  The Age of Oil may be headed for the same fate.  A Goldman Sachs outlook suggests the price of crude oil will hover around $45 a barrel for the next year or so and could even hit $20.

That's not good news for self-styled 'energy superpowers,' i.e. Canada.  Richard Fantin of Canadian Trends has an insightful report of what's in store for his province, Alberta, and it makes for grim reading.

Remember when then Liberal leader, Michael Ignatieff, proclaimed Athabasca the "beating heart of the Canadian economy for the 21st century"? Remember, "Iggy"? Oh, you would rather forget? I see.

That's the problem with betting the farm on the idea of flogging the world's highest-carbon and costliest oil.  It's like eating too many of those Pringles with Olestra. Something bad is bound to happen in your pants.

Poor Stephen Harper. He's devoted his entire premiership to Canada's Alberta's bituminous bounty. He rode roughshod over every possible obstacle, sweeping aside fisheries, navigation and marine habitat regulations; transforming Canada's National Energy Board into a blatantly kangaroo tribunal; even harnessing the state police and security agencies into service of Big Oil, all on the taxpayer's dime.

They knew it was a race and that time might not be on their side. Harper even brought in a repeat offender jailbird to be his envoy to the Oil Patch, brought the guy right into the PMO (which, judging by recent revelations, must have felt like a second home to Bruce Carson).

At one point Harper's then natural resources minister, Joe "Leatherback" Oliver, let slip the urgency of getting bitumen to "tidewater" and into the holds of supertankers. Oliver, perhaps imprudently, noted that if these pipelines weren't brought online and soon, Canada was at risk of bitumen becoming a "stranded asset."

The world is moving toward carbon pricing (no, it's not the idea of the opposition leaders) and even Harper is going to be hard pressed not to follow suit.  It could be a "perfect storm" - low oil prices, high-cost/high-carbon oil, carbon taxes.  As Richard Fantin noted, the squeeze is already causing Big Oil to 'cut corners' on its operations and that usually translates into shoddy maintenance, monitoring and, eventually, more oil spills.

If we're to have any hope of avoiding the worst climate change outcome, runaway global warming, the world is going to have to decarbonize very soon. The first fossil fuels to be abandoned will be the high-cost and the high-carbon. Coal, while relatively cheap, is very high-carbon and there's no shortage of US coal companies going bankrupt these days.  Bitumen, while not as high-carbon as coal, is the highest carbon fossil oil and, unlike coal, it's also costly to produce.

Harper gambled everything on bitumen, including Canada's reputation abroad. He and his government have brainwashed Canadians into believing the Tar Sands are indispensable to our economy whereas bitumen revenues really only represent 2% of Canada's GDP.  Two per cent doesn't sound like much but it's Heaven and Earth to the province of Alberta where royalties are treated as general revenue to fund essential services.

Albertans have a term for it. During boom times they "piss it all away" and when boom turns to bust in the oil patch the province dives headlong into recession. They've institutionalized a bubble economy. If you organized your household finances that way people, especially your creditors, would heap scorn and derision on you. In no time you would find yourself in a very ugly place.

There's more than schadenfreude to this. I don't live in Alberta. I live in British Columbia, coastal British Columbia.  Out here the collapse in world oil prices may be enough to halt Stephen Harper's pipeline/supertanker obsession. Let us pray.

Canada's Next Tyro?

Either Tom Mulcair doesn't know his ass from his elbow or, as some of us suspect, he's a pandering huckster with a loose tongue who, like Harper, sees riches in trawling for bottom votes. Either way, he's not the sort of leader any Canadian should want to re-open our constitution.

Yet if Mulcair becomes our next prime minister, a real possibility, and if he should actually follow through with his outlandish promises, a far more remote possibility, we're in for a constitutional donnybrook that could make America's fiasco in Iraq look quick and tidy.

Abolition/castration of the Senate - constitutional amendment. Quebec separation (50% + 1) - constitutional amendment. Electoral reform (abolition of "one voter/one vote") - constitutional amendment.

The irony is that Mulcair will have to do battle with the clear pronouncements of the Supreme Court of Canada, the very institution that has, alone, defended Canada from the darkest instincts and worst excesses of the Harper regime.

We hear from some New Dems that much of this can be done without constitutional amendment, a position that eerily echoes Harper's own in recent years. Harper/Mulcair - Mulcair/Harper? It has that wafting stench of an imperial premiership, the very thing we've been living under for the past decade.

These same New Dems foam at the mouth at the mere suggestion that their boy, like his rivals, is truly neoliberal. They point to baubles such as corporate taxes, day care and carbon pricing as if that somehow proves their point. Nonsense. I'll now recycle a passage from a comment I wrote this morning in the previous post:

One way or the other power will be in the hands of a neoliberal. None of the prospects is capable of breaking the neoliberal/corporatist/free market fundamentalist stranglehold on Canada. Some believe that promises of a small hike in corporate tax rates and carbon pricing show Mulcair and Trudeau are not neoliberal but that's the sort of loose talk you get from people who have no understanding of neoliberalism and its companion afflictions.

Like it or not there is a world government and it's corporate, wielding incredible powers that once resided as elements of national sovereignty now freely surrendered. Ever since the Thatcher/Reagan/Mulroney era we've given away the shop and our democracy, our society and our economy have been degraded accordingly.

As I see it, the first step to free ourselves of the yoke of neoliberalism is to smash the corporate media cartel. Strict regulations controlling concentration of ownership and media cross-ownership are essential if Canadians are ever to have access to the fullest possible range of information and opinion across the broadest political spectrum. When the national media have fallen under the control of corporatist forces the public is inevitably fed a corporatist message. You can tell when that has occurred. It's manifest when the media are transformed from the watchdog of government (on the side of the public) into the government's lap dog (a powerfully symbiotic relationship) which is what we've seen for a very long time.

Do you think you're going to get that sort of bold action from a Tom Mulcair or a Justin Trudeau? Not unless you're lying to yourself.

Fact is I don't trust Tom Mulcair, not one bit. He can't deliver on his endless promises without plunging Canada into similarly endless constitutional chaos that will inevitably leave the country divided, region pitted against region, our already grievously divided people ever further divided.

If I had to pick between the two (and thank Odin I don't), I'd vote for Trudeau if only because he's far more level headed than Mulcair and, in the result, more benign.

Post-Harper, Canada badly needs to regroup. It doesn't need a hot head promising to embark on constitutional Crusades.

Paul Martin Gives Tommy Angry Beard a Well-Deserved Kick in the Ass.

Paul Martin was the finance minister who plucked the federal government from the brink of fiscal chaos. It was a tough time for all including the provinces, even the Canadian Forces, but he balanced the budget and paid down $90 billion of our national debt. He kept the bankers in line and when he handed the reins to Harper he bequeathed a full treasury ready to absorb the brunt of the great collapse of 2008.

Put simply, Martin pulled our fat (yours and mine) out of the fire. Which is why he deserves to be heard on the mess we're in yet again and where we're headed.


The public has grown used to the Harper government’s mantra on deficits, but should be startled by what they hear from New Democrats, he said.

“That Tom Mulcair is now a student of Stephen Harper’s economy makes absolutely no sense,” said Martin.

“Where is the conscience of those who belong in the NDP? How can the NDP party — those who’ve worked it for all these years — stand for the fact that the party is now holding hands with the Conservatives and saying that our goal in the next mandate is to do absolutely nothing?”

“The current Conservative government has ground the economy down so far, trapping our most vulnerable of citizens in the process, that the next government has to act and that the NDP doesn’t understand that boggles the mind. Conservative obsession with eliminating the deficit down to the final decimal point is more than short-sighted. It’s yesterday’s war.”

Further evidence of how Mulcair and Harper are on the wrong page with their babble about balancing budgets comes from a new poll that finds Canadians believe their country is in a recession and support the federal government running a deficit to stimulate the economy.

Anyone who reads this blog knows I've been pretty tough on young Trudeau but I will give him credit for his commitment to a major, 3-year infrastructure programme. Sure he'll run a deficit but that's not the point. It's like bad cholesterol and good cholesterol. Harper's "throw a deck on the cottage" stimulus budget of 2009 was bad cholesterol. It was money squandered, gifted away, with no lasting return. Infrastructure spending, of the sort Harper didn't have the vision or courage to implement, is good cholesterol. It's money invested in public assets - highways, bridges, overpasses, power grids - that bolster the economy and reap returns for decades.

Of course, with this latest poll, the bearded chameleon may change his colours as effortlessly as he has on other situations in the past.

Wherein John Ibbitson Explores the Darkness that Lurks Within Stephen Harper

Yeah, That's Shifty, Just Below the Second H

Let's be blunt. John Ibbitson is probably the most prominent journalist in Canada totally in the bag for Stephen Harper.  Note that I used the word "journalist," a noun that eliminates most of the hydrophobic scribes at PostMedia.

When it comes to Harper you can trust Ibbitson never to put the boot in. Which is why excerpts of Ibbitson's new Harper biography, "Stephen Harper, The Making of a Prime Minister," serve as a powerful yardstick for considering Harper's fiercely concealed role in the Wright-Duffy scandal.

There are disagreeable aspects to Stephen Harper’s personality. He is prone to mood swings. He can fly off the handle. He goes into funks, sometimes for long periods. He is suspicious of others. The public is aware of these traits mostly through what’s written and reported in the media. In public, Harper is almost invariably calm, measured, and careful in what he says and how he says it. Yet none of us, watching him, have any difficulty believing that this closed, repressed personality is capable of lashing out from time to time. We all get the vibe. His personality also comes out in the tactics that the Conservative Party uses against its enemies, both perceived and real – which are, in a word, ruthless.

As with most of us, Harper’s character flaws are the reverse side of his character strengths: One would not exist without the other. He has been Prime Minister for a decade not despite these qualities but because of them.

...He can descend into rages, sometimes over trivial things, at other times during moments of crisis. A former aide to Harper recalls a time during the 2004 election campaign when things suddenly started to go very badly for the Conservatives, for reasons we’ll examine later. Harper was on the campaign bus, in Quebec, leading a conference call with senior campaign staff back at headquarters in Ottawa. “He was very, very angry,” the former aide recalls. “It was: ‘We are fucking going to do this, and you are fucking going to do that and I want to see this fucking thing done right now.’ And then he paused and asked: ‘And why does nothing happen around here unless I say ‘fuck’? ”

Harper’s temper manifests itself in different ways. Some days, he just gets up on the wrong side of the bed. Other times, he flies off the handle when confronted with bad news. That’s when the decibel level goes through the roof and the f-bombs start flying. Harper’s reaction when he was told in April, 2008, that the RCMP had raided Conservative Party headquarters in connection with the in-and-out affair, carrying out boxes of material past the TV cameras, was wondrous to behold.

...Another of Harper’s less attractive qualities is a perceived lack of loyalty toward others. One-time political adviser Tom Flanagan points out that Harper has betrayed or estranged many in the conservative movement who were at one time senior to him – Joe Clark, Jim Hawkes, Brian Mulroney, Preston Manning. This, Flanagan believes, is the product of Harper’s need to dominate whatever environment he is in. “I think he has this very strong instinct to be in charge,” he said. “He really wants to be the alpha figure, and he’s achieved that. So part of that is to dispose of anyone who might be considered to be a rival in some sense or another.”

Flanagan also asserts that “there is a huge streak of paranoia in Stephen. And he attracts people who have a paranoid streak. And if you don’t have one to begin with, you develop it, because you’re constantly hearing theories.” At its root, “looking back, there’s a visceral reluctance to trust the motives of other people,” Flanagan concludes. “He often overcomes his initial suspicions and will sign on to other people’s ideas. But the initial response is always one of suspicion.” Flanagan believes Harper is prone to depression. “He can be suspicious, secretive, and vindictive, prone to sudden eruptions of white-hot rage over meaningless trivia,” he wrote in 2014, “at other times falling into week-long depressions in which he is incapable of making decisions.”

...Some leaders like to micro-manage; others prefer to delegate. Each approach has its strengths and weaknesses. But Harper’s determination to grasp all of the levers, and even the widgets, of the federal government is matched by an equal determination to control the flow – or rather, the trickle – of information coming out of the government. Bureaucrats are prohibited from speaking to reporters. Scientists are prohibited from releasing the results of their research. Ambassadors have been ordered to obtain permission from the Centre before representing Canada in meetings. (The mantra from the PMO, as diplomats bitterly put it, is: Do nothing without instructions. Do not expect instructions.) Access to Information requests are routinely held up for so long that by the time the information is released, it’s no longer of any use, and the pages are mostly blacked out in any case.

Although they are in fact separate issues, this general air of secretiveness gets mixed up with the Conservatives’ willingness to demonize opponents. In fact, the Tories don’t have opponents; they have enemies. The Leader of the Liberal Party is an enemy. Judges who strike down their legislation are enemies. Union leaders are enemies. Authors and other artists who criticize the Conservatives are enemies. Journalists who cast a more-than-occasional critical eye on the government are enemies. And toward his enemies Stephen Harper bars no holds.

The Conservatives’ autocracy, secretiveness, and cruelty, critics accuse, debase politics to a level that threatens the very foundations of Canadian democracy. “Hardly anything in this world hints of Putinism more than Harperism,” columnist Ralph Surette of the Halifax Chronicle Herald opined.

...From his boyhood in Leaside, Harper learned not to trust those beyond the inner circle of family and close friends. That circle is not much larger today. Relations with those outside the wall can be cordial, but they are rarely based on implicit trust, an emotional resource that Harper invests in only a very few. And his encyclopedic memory includes not only the history of maritime border disputes, or who starred in what film; it also includes every act by every person who has slighted, offended, or betrayed him. Such acts are never forgotten and only rarely forgiven. Stephen Harper holds grudges.

He has never successfully cultivated the social skill of pretending to connect. He has difficulty feigning interest. His associates talk of him sometimes simply turning his back and walking away from them while they are in mid-sentence. He rarely displays much ability or desire to be collegial, or even polite. This tendency toward abruptness gets worse when he is tired or under stress.

...because his suspicion of the intentions of others is so overt, those who serve under him inhabit an environment of suspicion, and are, or become, suspicious as well – the culture of paranoia that Tom Flanagan observed when he worked for Stephen Harper. The reservoir of goodwill in the Prime Minister’s Office is shallow and quickly drained.

That said, if Harper is suspicious about the world around him, he has reason to be. As Joseph Heller famously said, “Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they aren’t after you.” Harper sees himself as an outsider because he is an outsider. He is from the West, but most of the country lives near the Great Lakes or St. Lawrence River. He is from the suburbs, but the Laurentian elites generally live downtown. Harper is hostile toward these elites, and they are hostile toward him. He is contemptuous of progressive academics, and they reciprocate. He distrusts the judiciary, and the judiciary has vindicated that distrust by striking down parts of his law-and-order agenda. The gala-goers he derides spit out his name in the foyer at intermission. When Stephen Harper rejected the University of Toronto, when he rejected the life of a Tory political aide in Ottawa, when he embraced the West, he fled from the commanding heights of the Central Canadian academic, cultural, and political landscape. He is the embodiment of alienation. 

What comes through is that Ibbitson, while seeking to describe Harper's character, in actuality documents his psychopathy.  Ibbitson's "this is the way of great men" apology is fine if by great men he means the likes of Caligula. What he describes is more akin to a high-functioning psychopath.

Now, assuming that Ibbitson hasn't depicted Harper unfairly or inaccurately, how does this relate to the Wright-Duffy scandal and the already preposterous claim that Harper knew nothing despite what the documents indicate and despite the revelations that his entire staff of top aides were well and truly in on it?

Harper is this profound control freak determined "to grasp all of the levers and even the widgets" of government except, we're asked to believe, when it came to the blossoming scandal of Mike Duffy.  In this case, and this alone, Harper simply left it to his footmen to sort out.  In this one moment in time the cloud of suspicion, distrust and paranoia lifted off Harper's shoulders.  Harper was magically released from "his need to dominate whatever environment he is in."

Harper's smokescreen would be difficult, if not impossible, to accept even from an emotionally stable prime minister.  But emotionally stable is not Stephen Harper. He would have required sedation to the point of near unconsciousness to let Wright-Duffy, in its minutest details, escape his control.  And none of that happened, did it.