The Northern Gateway Liability Trap

A major part of Harper's perfidy lies in the way the Northern Gateway is structured with liability cut-outs to let the major players escape liability.   IslandTides.com has an eye-opening feature on how coastal B.C. is being hung out to dry.   In another column, retired CBC journo Patrick Brown outlines the truly diabolical nature of the diluted bitumen Harper and Enbridge want to bring to British Columbia and our coast.

Read these reports.   Read how badly we're being set up.   Then explain what kind of government would do this to its own people.

Harper Ditches the Snitches

Why has Stevie Boy Harper gutted fisheries and marine protection services and staff, leaving the British Columbia coast seriously unprotected, just as he's pushing through the greatest environmental threat our coast has ever seen?

Firing monitoring and research staff, entire departments, at Fisheries and Oceans.   Relocating the west coast oil spill emergency centre from, well, the west coast to Quebec?   Closing major Coast Guard stations?   Why all of this?   Why now?   There's only one answer.  To Harper, the people who protect our coastal environment and our fisheries are potential snitches who'll blow the whistle on him and his Alberta pals.

In today's Times Colonist, Jack Knox interviewed Allan Hughes, who represents 100-Coast Guard members who serve as our marine traffic controllers.

They have a lot of questions about Enbridge's proposal to ship Alberta heavy oil from Kitimat, particularly with Ottawa reducing safety measures on the coast.

Much ado has been made about the federal government's budget-cutting plan to shut the coast guard operation in Vancouver. Less attention has been paid to the closing of two other marine communications and traffic services centres in Comox and Ucluelet, which will leave just the two remaining stations in Sidney and Prince Rupert to handle the entire West Coast. Not only does that mean a loss of local knowledge, but half of the coast could go unmonitored when communications systems fail, Hughes says.

...It can take several minutes to extract even the most basic information from bridge watch-keepers whose grasp of English is tenuous - and when you're in congested waters, you don't have minutes to react.

Hughes' members tell him language issues mean some foreign-flagged ships pose a higher risk of grounding or being involved in collisions, which makes those members wonder whose tankers would carry the heavy, gooey Alberta bitumen from Kitimat.

Note that B.C.'s northern waters are sufficiently treacherous that for decades tankers carrying Alaska crude have complied with a voluntary ban on sailing them. Instead, oil-carriers stay well out to sea before turning into Juan de Fuca Strait. How is it that an area deemed too dangerous for U.S. tankers is safe enough for others?

"The fact they intend to transit Hecate Strait or Dixon Entrance in winter is a disaster waiting to happen," Hughes says.

Knox asks a question that's had a lot of us wondering.   Just what is our premier, Christie Clark, playing at?   Is she actually Harper's and Enbridge's Judas Goat?

Funny how in a single day the debate moved from whether B.C. should back the pipeline to how much we should get for doing so.

Before fighting over how to divide the pie, shouldn't we decide whether to bake it at all?

And shouldn't we be asking Ottawa why it is cutting coastal safety at the same time it raises the risk?

Names such as Hecate Strait, Dixon Entrance or Second Narrows don't mean much east of the British Columbia/Alberta border but they mean a great deal to those who have navigated them and know how treacherous they can be.   Yet they're not nearly as treacherous as Steve Harper, Enbridge, the Alberta government, our Petro-Parliament and a nation largely indifferent to the perils of the west coast.

Every Man for Himself - Canadians Losing Faith in Government

We have lost confidence in government, provincial and federal, to tackle pressing issues.   It seems we have finally realized the people who are at the driver's seat are asleep at the wheel and content to remain that way.

"... a new Institute for Research on Public Policy-Nanos Research survey suggests a lack of confidence in the ability of provincial and federal governments to solve some pressing issues.

The findings, to be published next week in Policy Options magazine, attempt to connect issues Canadians identified as their top priorities with the confidence they felt in federal and provincial governments' ability to find solutions.

"When Canadians see their elected officials gathering, they expect them to do something. They expect them to accomplish something," he says.

"Canadians are more likely not to have confidence, and the sad thing is that confidence relates to many issues that are very very important to them. I think it’s almost a public policy despair," Nanos adds.

Not surprisingly, Nanos found the Harper Conservatives are "cherry picking" issues that are easy to deliver results on and dodging the tough problems such as climate change, education and improving living standards.   Collecting cheques form foreigners extracting and peddling bitumen, however, seems entirely suited to this government's abilities.   Just don't ask them to do anything to make Canada a decent place for your grandkids.

We Drove Gordon Campbell From Office for this Very Thing

The Auditor General has cut the legs out from under the Harper government's claim that they were misled over the realistic cost of the F-35 light bomber.

They knew full well, says Michael Ferguson, and they knew well before the last election and they lied through their teeth to the Canadian public to get Harper his majority.

Gordon Campbell and crew lied to the BC public about the harmonized sales tax in the runup to his last election.   Campbell resigned in disgrace before he was run out of town but his LINO Libs are facing extinction in the next election.

Harper pulled a Campbell scam.   If he'd been exposed on it during the campaign he wouldn't have a majority government, he wouldn't even have a minority government.  He too would have been run out of town.

It's so obvious it's glaring why no heads are rolling this time.  That's because the scam goes straight to the top, all the way up the Tory back passage, and stops at Harper's desk.  He's not only directly culpable but he's supremely accountable for his government's deceit and connivance.  Steve can't fire the generals for concealing information he had all along.   He can't fire MacKay either.  He'd have to fire his entire government and that would mean facing the Canadian public.

Stephen Harper plainly defrauded a lot of Canadians out of their votes by his deceptions and lies.  It's the very nature of the Harper beast.   Canada has two scourges - we have "one man rule" and that one man is as bent as a penny nail.

Harper and his cabinet stand indicted by the Auditor General.  It's time he asked the Governor General to issue a writ.   Anything else is simply indecent.

Election Fraud Traced to Edmonton Firm with Tory Ties

Election fraud?  The Harper Conservatives?  Oh, say it ain't so, Joe.  But apparently it is so, very much so.

Elections Canada launched its investigation after it was inundated with complaints about election day calls in Guelph, Ont., one of 18 ridings across the country where voters were targeted by harassing or deceptive phone messages in an apparent effort to discourage Liberal supporters from voting.

In Guelph, a riding the Conservatives hoped to take from the Liberals, voters received recorded calls pretending to be from Elections Canada, telling them their polling stations had been moved. The calls led to a chaotic scene at one polling station, and likely led some voters to give up on voting.

...the Conservatives are conducting an internal probe. A party lawyer is interviewing campaign workers to find who was behind the deceptive “robocalls.”

...Elections Canada traced the calls to Racknine Inc., a small Edmonton call centre that worked for the party’s national campaign and those of at least nine Conservative candidates, including Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s own campaign in Calgary Southwest.


Using telephone billing records and Racknine server logs, Elections Canada investigators identified the Racknine account holder who sent out the calls.

Matt Meier, owner of Racknine, said he was unaware one of his customers was involved in the calls until contacted by Elections Canada in November.

He said he knows whose account was used for the calls, but could not reveal the owner, because of client confidentiality and concerns about interfering with the investigation. He said it was someone “down East” — meaning Ontario or Quebec.

In a party whose leader wants so desperately to emulate his American idols in the Republican Party, scummy and even criminal tricks like this aimed at perverting Canadian democracy probably shouldn't come as much of a surprise.   After all, everyone knows how much democracy means to Stephen Harper and he sets the tone for everyone else in that fetid organization.