Mike, This Is No Time for Trivialities

In his anything but stunning opening to his summer long bus tour of Canada, Mike Ignatieff yet again completely underwhelmed with his first salvo.


The announcement? More arts funding! Great Mike, but is that really very high on the average voter's (the same voters you're not reaching) priority list? Here's a word to you Libs who may think so - you're wrong, flat out wrong, dead wrong.


Arts funding? Oh Ignatieff's at it again. Boring. Nothing to see here. Too bad. What's on TV?


There's no wonder MI can't gain any traction, his boots are mired in clay. The good part is that he's whittled his way through the Liberal ranks so he's probably not in much risk of losing too many of the remaining die hard party faithful. He'd have to be caught buggering the Bishop at this point for that to happen.

Okay Igs, supporting artists is a personal priority for you. We get it - descendant of Czarist nobility, spawn of the diplomatic corps, elevated and esteemed academic - great. We all get it including the guys with votes who hear this yet again and change the channel, some of them for the last time.

Spending the summer drifting around for beer and burgers and chinwags with party faithful and wannabes is one thing - it's a waste of time that's not yours to waste buddy. It's not your job to limp along in hope that Stephen Harper has an aneurysm or actually chokes on a pretzel.

Politics is a blood sport Yer Igness and the guy at the top, the guy who has done things he can be held accountable for, is supposed to be the punching bag. Why then is it the guy at the top, the prime monster hisself, who's always throwing all the punches - and landing? He's made an art of gaining comfortable minorities with cowed oppositions by transforming elections into referenda on opposition leaders. In between elections he can pretty much do as he pleases, incrementally advancing his agenda with the complicity of a cowardly and feckless opposition scared out of its political wits. It's like a high school bully beating up on pre-schoolers. And it's sickening to watch.

I'm calling you out Igs, you're a damned coward. You've played Harper's stooge so long, been his wilful dupe, that the credibility you need to attack him now is squandered, discarded long ago on the floor of the House of Commons. Oh sure, every time you propped up bad legislation or staged abstention votes to save Harper there were plenty of rationalizations for it. The odd time when you didn't play ball, Harper had Layton there to backstop him. How in hell did anyone expect to get any legislative accountability from a power manipulator like Harper in a field of opposition sheep? You were the force multiplier that transformed his minority into a quasi-majority government. That's about all you've accomplished. Oh yeah, I forgot about arts funding.

Igs, if you can't start throwing punches, real jabs and fast hooks, and landing - if you can't start rocking Harper on his heels - you're a cheap poseur occupying but not discharging the role of LOL, Canada's opposition leader. It's nice enough - a house, a decent paycheque, a chauffeur, buckets of hobnobbing - but you're still supposed to be a political brawler, ready at the drop of a hat to knock Harper to the floor and kick him straight out to the curb. How many of us would rather witness just a bit of that than hear a lot of vapid drivel about arts funding?

The big problem you've got now Mr. Ignatieff is that you haven't got room to swing. You drew your party so close to Harper, turned so collaborative with his agenda, that he's sort of got you clinched in the corner. He steps back quickly, gets in a few shots of his own, and then ties you right back up again on the ropes. You have to get off the ropes, get some room, get ready to hit this guy hard, where he's vulnerable.

Oh, but where is Harper vulnerable? Well now that's where vision comes in. You're not going to make much headway bitching about the past, not when you are associated with supporting it. People have that image firmly in their heads and it's not going away anytime soon. For you, haranguing about the past is a post-electoral, one way trip to the cloakroom Igs.

Okay you haven't got much to work with in the past but that still leaves the future. And what fertile fields you have in front of you to till. Orchards sagging under the weight of low-hanging fruit. How about accountability and transparency - dismembering the political commissar structure Harper has implemented to gag the bureaucracy and the armed forces and thereby transform them into a propaganda agency of the PMO? How about a serious discussion of the Canadian north and what we can really do to consolidate Canada's interests? How about our crumbling infrastructure - the rotten electricity grid, steadily deteriorating bridges and highways, our antiquated and obsolete rail system - the very arteries we badly need to unclog to maintain a healthy Canada in the future? How about this one - global warming. Yeah, climate change that's already impacting Canada and is picking up steam while you jokers in Ottawa turn your heads and whistle past the graveyard. Now I know that could make your Bitumen Booster image on the Tar Sands just a little awkward but keep this in mind - the Tar Sands aren't inevitable but global warming is.

Since I'm on the topic of the Tar Sands, here's what I think you should do. Start calling them what they are, the "TAR" sands. Back the venture if you must but re-order your priorities. Place production and export on a level plane with remediation of the immediate and long-ranging environmental calamities already building there. Of course that means you'll have to do some reading and some thinking and make yourself able to discuss the Peace and Athabasca rivers, the MacKenzie River watershed, tailing ponds, acid rain, upgrader emissions, pipelines, depletion of natural gas and the potential for nuclear-powered extraction and production. That means you'll have to do what no one before you has managed - come up with a vision of the Tar Sands that works both financially and environmentally because you can't make it work without both.

You need vision. You need to find matters that are on the minds of the Canadian voters that they're not hearing discussed. Here's my shortlist - the scourge of income inequality and narrowing Canada's growing wage gap; concrete and immediate programmes for environmental remediation and climage change adaptation with emphasis on Canada's coastal regions, all of them; the rationalization of Canada's military role abroad and the refocusing on national defence to meet the challenges of a changing world (read the US Quadrenniel Defense Review if you don't get it); a wholesale review of Canadian foreign policy in a world where more will be needing help with fewer able to give it; revitalizing Canadian society and our economy with a Marshall Plan of direct investment in infrastructure and alternative energy.

Those are just a few ideas for a message that you can lift off the pages, ideas that can reach and resonate with a nervous voting public. Each of them opens room between you and Harper, room to distance and position yourself to hit him where he's weakest - his own crippling lack of vision. Harper is an ideologue at heart, a grey soul wrapped inside a grey suit. That's not a good thing, Igs. You don't have to be him.

Global Warming - A Myth? Get a Grip

This just in from NASA, the first six months of 2010 were the "hottest half-year on record" and the second half is expected to follow suit.

Now we know that we keep telling you Denialists that a cold spell every now and then doesn't determine the reality of global warming driven climate change. A cold spell is weather. It's a spell, not a climate defining multi-year trend line. So one record hot year, this one if you like, isn't conclusive proof of global warming either.

This year is, however, one more piece of a clear and compelling climate trend line. This EPA report chronicles a whole host of climate change indicators that corroborate the inarguable impacts of global warming on the United States. Denialists, you're just going to have to suck on that. Sorry.

And then there's this cheery note from The New Republic:

What can we expect going forward? Here's one clue: A recent study by Stanford climate modelers suggested that extreme heat waves—similar to what the Northeast endured last week—will become increasingly frequent in the United States over the next 30 years. That's bad news for agriculture (not to mention people who hate sweating). But what caught my eye about the Stanford study is that even if we do take drastic action to cut emissions, we've already warmed up the planet enough to cause serious increases in heat waves in the near future (see below for what we can expect even if we hit that ambitious 2°C target). It's going to be hard to dodge the heat. The only real question left is how much hotter we're going to make it.

A Lighter Moment

Every now and then there's nothing like a good bit of levity. Here's a clip on how to trick people into believing you're good looking.



And if that's not enough hilarity, Bristol Palin and Levi Johnston have announced they're engaged - again. Only this time Sarah is none too happy.

The Century of Revolution

A few months back I came across an interesting treatise that predicted the 21st will be a century of revolution, true global upheaval. It's an arresting prospect and it's very much on the mind of some political and a great many military elites of the developed world.

Put simply, there's just too much inequality whether it's on a hemispheric, regional, or national level to support the type of stability we aspire to achieve. The great north-south divide that troubled Trudeau in his latter years in office has never healed. We've tried to maintain the economic vestiges of 19th century colonialism but the days when that was meekly accepted have ushered in an era of questing for independence from us that's often tinged with bitter resentment.

While we've been distracted by the shiny things - Iraq and Afghanistan - much of South America has been quietly shifting out from under Washington's once powerful, sometimes suffocating, influence. The land of Bolivar has seen a distancing evident in the ascendancy of left wing governments looking east and west - and south - rather than constantly gazing north as in the past.

Africa remains a wild card in so many ways. The influence of the West is in decline as the emerging economic superpower, China, spreads through the region. Resources (and governments) we once treated as ours for the plucking now have better options.

South and East Asia are also on the march. This is where superpower rivalries, economic and military, are played out. This is China and India's gateway to the Middle East oilfields, the Caspian Basin gas fields and the mineral riches of the 'Stans (including Afghanistan). It's curious that Canadians so rarely consider the intractable geo-political struggles that shackle this region even while our soldiers serve and die babysitting an unresolved civil war.

Around the globe the post-war stability we never truly appreciated while it existed ended with the dissolution of the Soviet Union. For those four plus decades while the world went to sleep every night with the ever real possibility of nuclear holocaust, the world was neatly parcelled into the Western bloc, the Soviet bloc and the generally powerless and complacent non-aligned bloc. Washington and Moscow were global class monitors keeping the kids in line and slapping them about when necessary or using them to wage proxy wars when that was seen desirable.

Perhaps because we saw the Cold War world as one-dimensional we lost sight of the not always intended benefits it bestowed. We took the good stuff for granted which is probably why, in the wake of the end of the Cold War, we did so little to preserve and reinforce a truly stable, new world order. Washington came to believe that the demise of its superpower hegemon rival was a de facto licence to extend its unipower hegemony. It was a brief moment of utter madness and inevitable hubris that spawned bizarre covens like The Project for the New American Century that openly advocated the United States use its unrivalled military superiority to cement its global economic and military supremacy, to impose its order on the world on a plain "or else" basis.

America lost sight of the fact that its real enemy, the one that most threatened to undermine American stability and strength, was itself. An Age of Ruin set in beginning with Ronald Reagan that saw the industrial powerhouse transition from a culture of production to a culture of consumption. When Reagan took office, America was the world's largest creditor nation. When he left it had become the world's largest debtor nation. Whereas all of his postwar predecessors, Democrat and Republican alike, had steadily (even during the enormously expensive Vietnam War) whittled down America's debt to GDP ratio, that was all washed away by Reagan, Bush I, Bush II and now by Obama who has inherited the debris of their mental illness.

Corporate America forged the era of globalization which so richly served the oligarchs, the rentier classes, while transferring wealth out of the middle and working classes where, despite productivity leaps, wages stagnated even as the country's manufacturing base, the beating heart of a stable middle class, was shipped offshore. The scourge of inequality, fought back from the days of Roosevelt to Carter, returned with a vengeance. (That inequality dooms America to a future lashed to bubble economics is the subject of a Robert Reich piece posted here yesterday).

Globalization, as many warned unsuccessfully at the outset, has installed a political and economic force that now rivals, even endangers, democracy in our countries - corporatism. The advent of globalization - the free flow of capital (i.e. offshore manufacturing) and the enforced abandonment of trade and tariff regulation - effected a direct transfer of sovereign power from the nation state to the multinational corporate state. It was an enormously one-way deal. As Kevin Phillips writes in American Theocracy, his United States blundered into the trap that brought down so many earlier economic superpowers - the Dutch, the Spanish, the Brits. In search of quick and big returns, America used its wealth to grow its own successors' economies.

During the Cold War much more attention was paid to military developments. Since then we've found other distractions in the inescapable world of infotainment and immediate gratification. Yet there are indeed a number of major arms races underway that mirror the greater economic and political upheaval inevitable in an era of ascending and declining powers. India and China are rearming at great speed which is particularly concerting given that both are rivals for Middle East oil and both share a border region that holds the glacial watershed of their major and already stressed rivers. China, long a Soviet/Russian customer, is now engineering its own advanced weaponry from submarines and "blue water" surface ships to missiles to combat aircraft. India is following suit expanding its own blue water navy and deploying its first indigenous, nuclear submarines. The relationship between these growing economic and military rivals bears the hallmarks of containment and overlapping spheres of interest.

Before the second decade of the Century of Revolution is out we'll know whether we've lost the fight to beat back nuclear weapon proliferation. At the moment it's not looking good. During the Cold War we had the US, USSR, Britain, France and China in the "nuclear club" and it earned each a permanent seat on the UN Security Council. Then Israel, India and Pakistan followed more recently by North Korea and soon, apparently, Iran too. Syria and Libya have already tinkered with developing their own nukes and many Middle Eastern countries are eyeing Iran and Israel and nervously wondering if they too need a nuclear deterrent. Meanwhile Brazil is rumoured to be a candidate for introducing nuclear weaponry to South America.

We have had centuries to witness nations ascend and decline but the process in the Century of Revolution is markedly different. We've run out of stuff. We've already hit the wall. They can't become us, because there's not enough stuff to make that possible. Sometime in the late 1980's mankind's consumption reached our planet's annual production of renewables - water, trees, fish and so on. We got away with it for decades thanks to sleight of hand, eating into our reserves, and outright conjuring tricks such as the Green Revolution, but the hens always come home to roost. By living beyond our biospheric means we've collapsed our fisheries, turned arable land into deserts and savaged our forests. We have relentlessly pursued and allowed ourselves to become utterly dependent upon unsustainable supplies of freshwater, water that nature cannot replace quickly enough for our needs.

Global warming is already whipsawing global precipitation patterns. As the atmosphere warms it accelerates evaporation while increasing the amount of stored water vapor, itself a powerful greenhouse gas. Some already pressed areas see a future of protracted drought while others are battered by successive cycles of drought and flood. Some wealthy countries can try technical fixes such as desalination but that too is a conjuring trick with devastating side effects.

So, we're out of good stuff. Now what to do? Well power traditionally translates into access. Those who have power expect to be first in the queue. But they can't get a power-size share of an already allocated pie without somebody else taking a much smaller than usual slice. The question becomes who gives up how much and why? That's something we'll be struggling with for quite a while and it may cause us to revisit some of our fanciful notions of free-market capitalism - again the Century of Revolution.

Can we avoid a reversion to 19th century colonialism? Will ascending economic superpowers be willing to accept anything less than tightly controlled economic and political domination of increasingly scarce resource producers? It's not as though India with its tradition of castes or China with its one-party rule can be expected to be generous to the democratic and economic

aspirations of the states they will colonize. But can they achieve the security of supply they will need without the sort of coercion we imposed in our turn?

A Century of Revolution, probably entailing a lot of violent revolution, seems inescapable in a century in which all nations will struggle with existential threats, naturally occurring and in many respects man made. Our options for seeing mankind through this century are rather stark - and obvious. 18th century free-market capitalism superheated by the forces of corporatism is over, finished. That model is growth-driven and that is so 1980's. Growth is over. We've hit the wall. We've run out of stuff. It's no longer growth but allocation and distribution that will determine the fates of nations and peoples.

We will come back into balance with the finite limits of our biosphere because we have no other choice. We will have to order ourselves in ways we will find difficult to accept because it is we who must adapt to fit our planet. It can't be done the other way around, not any longer. That comfortable option is foreclosed.

When planning is based not on growth but on allocation it shifts the focus from opportunity to inequality. People look for a lot more equality in sacrifice than in prosperity. We can become very egalitarian when we perceive that to be vital to our self-interest. If we aren't to be stampeded off the cliff we will have to pull back and that promises to be a struggle of truly revolutionary dimensions. The forces of the status quo will not go peacefully into the night. We need only look at the extraordinary efforts of the Fossil Fuelers in maintaining their dominance at mankind's considerable expense to understand that corporatism is tenacious and, as needed, ruthless.

An allocation based society is inherently far more communal than most of us have ever experienced. It is an order that confounds free market capitalism, tames it, and dismembers corporatism - not because of some grandiose ideology but of sheer necessity. Religious nutjobs aside, man no longer exercises absolute dominion over our planet and that is one struggle we cannot win.

Be very clear about one thing. The scrapping (let's call it wholesale reformation) of 18th century economic, social and political models isn't optional. Indeed it's the only avenue for a peaceful transformation of the world order. There are alternatives. We can let the planet go into runaway meltdown and purge itself of all but a few dozen millions of us. We can take our struggle for dominance into the one remaining arena, the military zone, and thereby also purge the planet of much of its population. I think I'd prefer the reformation route if you don't mind.

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By the way before leaving the topic of inequality, I'd really like you to read my post A Must-Read for the Liberal Right in which I review The Spirit Level. Check it out and you may find it worthwhile to get your hands on a copy of that book.

Robert Reich Dissects America's New Great Recession. The Real Culprit? Inequality.

In a piece written for The Nation, Robert Reich argues that the structural reason for today's Great Recession is America's surging inequality:

Consider: in 1928 the richest 1 percent of Americans received 23.9 percent of the nation's total income. After that, the share going to the richest 1 percent steadily declined. New Deal reforms, followed by World War II, the GI Bill and the Great Society expanded the circle of prosperity. By the late 1970s the top 1 percent raked in only 8 to 9 percent of America's total annual income. But after that, inequality began to widen again, and income reconcentrated at the top. By 2007 the richest 1 percent were back to where they were in 1928—with 23.5 percent of the total.

Each of America's two biggest economic crashes occurred in the year immediately following these twin peaks—in 1929 and 2008. This is no mere coincidence. When most of the gains from economic growth go to a small sliver of Americans at the top, the rest don't have enough purchasing power to buy what the economy is capable of producing. America's median wage, adjusted for inflation, has barely budged for decades. Between 2000 and 2007 it actually dropped. Under these circumstances the only way the middle class can boost its purchasing power is to borrow, as it did with gusto. As housing prices rose, Americans turned their homes into ATMs. But such borrowing has its limits. When the debt bubble finally burst, vast numbers of people couldn't pay their bills, and banks couldn't collect.

...A second parallel links 1929 with 2008: when earnings accumulate at the top, people at the top invest their wealth in whatever assets seem most likely to attract other big investors. This causes the prices of certain assets—commodities, stocks, dot-coms or real estate—to become wildly inflated. Such speculative bubbles eventually burst, leaving behind mountains of near-worthless collateral.

The crash of 2008 didn't turn into another Great Depression because the government learned the importance of flooding the market with cash, thereby temporarily rescuing some stranded consumers and most big bankers. But the financial rescue didn't change the economy's underlying structure. Median wages are continuing their downward slide, and those at the top continue to rake in the lion's share of income. That's why the middle class still doesn't have the purchasing power it needs to reboot the economy, and why the so-called recovery will be so tepid—maybe even leading to a double dip. It's also why America will be vulnerable to even larger speculative booms and deeper busts in the years to come.

The horrible and far reaching fallout of income inequality is thoroughly examined and extremely well documented in The Spirit Level, Why Equality is Better for Everybody, by British epidemiologists Wilkinson and Pickett. It's one of the most illuminating, fascinating books I've read all year. Get your hands on a copy. It's an eye-opener that harnesses the power of scientific research to a very serious social malaise that's damaging us all - rich, poor and everyone in between.



Reich served as Labor Secretary under Bill Clinton. He's been a professor at Harvard and currently is Professor of Public Policy at the Goldman School of Public Policy, Berkley.

Why Does Harper Want a Tanker Disaster in Vancouver's Burrard Inlet?

Just how stupid is Stephen Harper? Does he imagine an oil tanker spill in Vancouver harbour is going to enhance his prospects of selling the world's filthiest crude to Asia?

The Tyee reports that Transport Canada has 'quietly slashed mandatory crew requirements for the tugboats escorting oil tankers through the treacherous waters of Second Narrows -- a move that vessel crews feel is needlessly increasing the chance of a major oil spill in Vancouver."

A spokesman for the tug crew union says Transport Canada has exploited loopholes to permit tugs that formerly had to deploy four-man crews in escorting oil tankers to get by with just two crewmembers instead.

"If a tug was operating in the harbour in protected waters, and all it was going to be doing was pushing a ship onto a dock or pulling it off a dock, then they can sail a two-man crew. But the minute that tug hooks onto a vessel and does what's called an escort through the Second Narrows or the First Narrows, then it's supposed to have four man crew. And now Transport Canada is saying that since this is the inner harbour, tugs can do the escort through the Second Narrows with only a two-man crew."

The union also complains that Transport Canada has eliminated the requirement for the tugs to have a qualified engineer aboard escort tugs allowing the operators to substitute a rookie deckhand instead.

With Iggy's announced intention to scuttle a northern Tar Sands tanker port in Kitimat, that leaves Burrard Inlet and Vancouver harbour as the default option. The Second Narrows passage is indeed treacherous for navigation yet the Harper Tories seem content to increase the odds of a disastrous tanker accident that could devastate Vancouver's harbour and tourism facilities.

Astonishing.

Your Daily Call to Arms - Nikiforuk Style

With an election possibly looming for the fall I plan to argue the case for the Libs pursuing major, dynamic environmental initiatives in the campaign. I believe it's a no-lose proposition for the Libs. It is a splendid vehicle to reconnect with an increasingly disengaged, disaffected if you like, voting public apathetic and uninspired by the tedium that is today's Ottawa.

I'll attempt to post a daily "call to arms" - a snippet taken from here and there that I hope will capture your imagination and focus it on how much opportunity simply awaits the Liberals - and Canada - if they can only muster the courage to scrap their obscure lethargy and turn dynamic.

Ignatieff's simplistic endorsement of the Athabasca Tar Sands touches a really raw nerve in me. The way the Liberal leader, like all the other Bitumen Boosters, trivialize the environmental catastrophe building there is infuriating. The way they resort to the most facile sophistry in dismissing these problems is stripped bare by this passage from Andrew Nikiforuk's Tar Sands, Dirty Oil and the Future of a Continent:

"The rapid devlopment of the tar sands has made climate change a joke about Everybody, Somebody, Anybody, and Nobody. Everybody thinks reducing carbon dioxide emissions needs to be done and expects Somebody will do it. Anybody could have reduced emissions, but Nobody did. Everybody now blames Somebody, when in fact Nobody asked Anybody to do anything in the first place."

Sorry Iggy but that's game, set and match Nikiforuk.

Here's a Campaign the Libs Might Just Win

Say what you will about the guy but Stephen Harper has been astonishingly successful at manipulating a wobbly official opposition into supporting or at least not opposing Tory policies, Liberal acts and omissions that could easily come back to haunt them on the campaign trail.

As Steve showed us in trashing Dion he likes to run an election not on his record, not on his policies, not on his vision, but as a referendum on the opposition. He basically says, "look at these guys - they've got nothing, at least nothing worth supporting and, remember, that awful sponsorship scandal." Gulp.

Having carried Harper's water on the economy, backing the Harper-Ignatieff "Pinata" stimulus budget and having lost traction on the torture scandal and just about everything else that Canada's Furious Leader has pulled these past years, Ignatieff is largely neutralized which at least partly clears the way for Harper to repeat his Dion caper. Trying to revive outrage over these things with an election looming is a waste of energy, something the Libs haven't shown in abundance since the new guy took over.

No, the Libs need a policy of their own making, an eye opener, something that will connect with and resonate among the public. My suggestion? Water, freshwater, something Canadians instinctively cherish. Fight the election on water. Turn it into a campaign to protect and secure Canada's water resources for this century.

Here's the thing. With climate change already impacting Canada, just like everywhere else, we need to take stock. Canada is one of just a handful of nations, all northern, that stand to be the last and least affected by the ravages of global warming. We have options. We have choices for adaptation and remediation the rest of the world can't even dream of. But, and here's the but, the key to most of our options, our environmental advantages, lie in what we decide, in the immediate future, to do about our freshwater.

There's probably no aspect of our country less well managed, haphazardly monitored, more poorly regulated than our water systems and reserves. And we're paying a big price for that now and stand to pay a horrific price very soon if we don't wake up.

Most Canadians live in a bubble full of myths about Canada's bountiful, pristine waters. Every time some jackass raises the idea about bulk water exports to a rapidly drying United States, it reinforces that myth. Maude Barlow in her book Blue Covenant succinctly addresses the core myths surrounding Canada's freshwater, myths that endanger this very resource:

1. The Myth that Canada has a surplus of water.
2. The Myth that Canadians love our water heritage.
3. The Myth that the Canadian government protects our water.

We don't have a surplus of water because we don't get much more precipitation than most other countries. We have untapped surface water but their volumes are relatively static and once drained won't simply fill up again overnight.

Barlow points out that while Canada does receive about 6.5% of the world's renewable water, 60% of that flows north. The 90% of Canadians living along the Canada-US border actually have access to but 2.6 % but we can't count on even those levels continuing with the advent of climate change. Saskatchewan and Alberta, for example, are at grave risk.

Our institutional ignorance about the state of Canada's groundwater is discussed by Barlow:

...Documents prepared by Natural Resources Canada warn that Canadians face tremendous challenges in the future, and even the leading scientists do not know how long supplies will last. So little is known about Canada's groundwater, or subterranean, supplies - upon which more Canadians rely every day - that it could take thirty years to produce a comprehensive inventory.

Barlow convincingly disputes our notional love of Canada's water bounty by pointing out how poorly we take care of it.

Forty-two percent of water discharged by Canada's manufacturing businesses is dumped untreated into Canada's waterways, and our cities dump another two hundred billion liters of raw sewage every year. This sewage is a mixture of water, human waste, microorganisms, toxic chemicals, heavy metals, excreted pharmaceuticals and pathogens such as cholera, typhoid and hepatitis B.

...Untreated sewage from cottages and communities and the dumping of effluent from massive hog-farm operations have made Lake Winnipeg, the tenth largest freshwater lake in the world, Canada's sickest body of water... Phosphorous was the main pollutant in Lake Erie and is a major player in the contamination of Lake Winnipeg. Despite what we now know, phosphorus dumping, particularly from Canada's pulp and paper industry, is on the rise, according to Corporate Knits in its 2006 annual report on water. The Abitibi Consolidated plant in Alma, Quebec, alone increased phosphorus dumping from 80,505 kilograms in 2003 to 448,005 kilograms in 2005.

And then, of course, there's the rapacious consumption and reckless contamination of the Athabasca and Peace by Alberta's Tar Sanders.

Finally, Barlow cites successive federal governments for creating the impression in the public's mind that Ottawa, "has laws and regulations in place to protect Canada's water, both ecologically and from commercial export." We don't.

"As water expert Karen Bakker, a professor at the University of British Columbia, notes, Canada is one of the few industrialized countries in the world not to have legally enforced water quality standards. Unlike the United States and Europe, for instance, Canada has no national standards for sewage treatment that cities and towns must follow. The only serious federal law regarding water protection is the Fisheries Act, which prohibits dumping of materials in waterways that would harm aquatic life. But this act is routinely broken. Mining Watch Canada points to a federal study that evaluated the Metal Mining Liquid Effluent Regulations of the Fisheries Act, which found that almost half of the mining operations in Canada are in noncompliance with the act. Nevertheless, not one charge has been laid against any of these companies. The story with the forestry industry is similar.

Now this is one area where there's plenty of room for finger pointing at Liberals and Tories alike. Jean Chretien, Paul Martin, even Stephane Dion can be rebuked but so can Tories Mulroney and Harper. The point is that a Liberal water policy can be a break with the past, the lot of it, and that's just how it can be presented. A new determined and effective policy, a new way.

It's easy to make the case for a thoroughly reformed water policy introducing wholesale changes from the ground up to ensure that our children and grandchildren's Canada will enjoy as much water security as we can muster.

It isn't difficult to anticipate how the Harper Cons and their industrial benefactors will push back on a major water initiative. It isn't difficult to be prepared to meet them head on in a positive way that will resonate with the voting public.

Pulp and paper mills don't vote. Bitumen mines don't vote. But the people who's welfare and future these outfits and those like them endanger do and will vote if they sense with confidence that someone is sincerely holding out the means to genuinely protect their extraordinary resource one in their minds at least they hold very dear.

I think Liberals have a real interesting choice right now. They can either rise to the moment, do something dynamic and truly meaningful, or while away the time on bus tours waiting to get mauled in the fall by Stephen Harper.

Why Canada Is In Desperate Need of Fresh Leadership

No matter where one lives, people face many problems - social, economic, environmental, security problems, the list goes on and we all have them. It is precisely because we have to face these challenges collectively that we maintain political structures, governments in all their varying forms.

Now we hope, today rather cynically, that our governments will be representative. We hope they'll honestly and faithfully represent our interests, at least attempting to balance our individual interests with our collective interests while accommodating the interests of others - corporations, other countries and so on. We have so many interests we require levels of government - municipal, provincial, federal - that we hope will all represent our interests at the appropriate level.

Yet politicians fail us, cease to represent us, when, in their own interests they construe the problems and challenges that beset us as primarily political issues. I can think of no more disturbing example of this than the way in which our federal politicians treat the Athabasca Tar Sands. Here's a clue. They can't even bring themselves to say "tar." To them it's the Athabasca Oil Sands as though the fossil fuel industry was actually pumping oil instead of mining the bitumen/sand/clay sludge. There's a reason they call the operator SynCrude, not just "crude." In effect, the first word that passes their lips is a lie, a deliberate lie that serves as the foundation for an elaborate construct of lies required to mask or trivialize the risks in order to frame the problem as a political issue.

As we may well discover in the not too distant future, Athabasca is a wildly out of control environmental catastrophe or collection of looming catastrophes. Yet how many of our supposed leaders merely pay lip service to the problems? Oh yes, we must get those carbon emissions under control. Yes, we must do something about the water concerns. They're bullshitting you and me. Yes we must do what exactly? Who must do it? By when must it be done? Who is to pay for whatever must be done? Who is to compensate those who are already suffering the fallout? What if it's not done? What then? These so called leaders spend less time addressing any of these questions than I just spent writing them. Does that tell you anything?


It tells me that there are several aspects of the Tar Sands development that are so awful, so intractable that they can't be addressed by political leaders. They're mentioned in the most simplistic terms, dismissively, in passing. In the same breath in which they're uttered the politician moves on to another subject. Yet every time they do that, they speak volumes if only you're listening.

To understand that these passing remarks are a disingenuous sop, a political contrivance, you have to learn more about the Tar Sands than our political leaders want you to know. They don't want to get involved in a discussion about the litany of environmental catastrophes building in Athabasca and, trust me, greenhouse gas emissions are just one of several and not the worst by any means.

Our political elite would rather you didn't read Marsden's indictment of Alberta's oil and gas industry, Stupid to the Last Drop, or Andrew Nikiforuk's excellent, Tar Sands, Dirty Oil and the Future of a Continent, or Maude Barlow's Blue Covenant, or Monbiot's Heat or Jarred Diamond's Collapse or any of the dozens of well researched, well annotated books, reports and studies that shine a glaring light on Athabasca. They don't want you thinking of the Athabasca and Peace Rivers as feeding into and thereby threatening Canada's largest watershed, the world's third largest, the MacKenzie before wending their way into the Arctic Ocean. They don't want you to trouble your gentle mind with information about the toxins brought to the surface along with the bitumen sludge - the carcinogens, the heavy metals - or the rates at which they leak/leech into the groundwater. They would rather not have you dwell on the industry's rapacious consumption of our limited reserves of conventional natural gas used to generate steam to liquify sludge so that it can then be pumped to the surface. SAGD? Don't even ask. They don't want you to look too closely at the Athabasca "tailing ponds" many of them lining the banks of the Athabasca itself. These things are eye openers that serve as an immensely powerful indictment of the Tar Sands, the Fossil Fuelers, and the the cheap hucksters and fixers in high political office who, at every turn, place Big Oil's whim above the interests of Canada and the Canadian people.

With the ascendancy of the new economic superpowers - China, India, Brazil and, to some extent, Russia, we're faced with a world in which there's a burgeoning demand for a strategic resource that's already in decline - conventional crude oil. That has already sent us chasing Option "B" - unconventional oil such as tar sands, shale oil and deepwater reserves. Unconventional oil is considerably more expensive because it's invariably much harder to extract and process, much harder and vastly more dangerous. Whether it's drilling by remote control into the deep seabed or extracting tar and countless thousands of tons of associated toxins once safely buried deep below the surface, it's all high risk and potentially devastating.

It's ironic that the controversy over the Tar Sands raises the hackles of so many Albertans who have virtually nothing to do with the Oil Patch. The ironies are multifold. It's their environment that will suffer the most and just keep suffering decades, even centuries after the last barrel of commercially viable bitumen has been taken from Athabasca and Big Oil has moved on. Those in the south usually don't understand that they're not really immune to what's happening in the north. They don't grasp how climate change will impact their already limited freshwater resources and they're facing the devastation of their own groundwater reserves by the shale "fraccing" industry. Big Oil took'em dancing, bought'em a few drinks and now it has its hand down their pants all while their political guardians count their bucks and look the other way. And we used to think it was funny how the Manhattan natives were duped out of their lands with beads and trinkets.

I want to share with you just a few things I've discovered about the Tar Sands that you'll never hear mentioned by Harper or Ignatieff or Layton. Maybe when I'm done you'll ask yourself why not?

Water. Virtual water. That's water exhausted in the production of an export. It's water lost to the producing nation, water than might as well be treated as if it had been exported. Athabasca produces a million barrels of bitumen a day which means that, even with enhanced recycling, the Tar Sands virtually export three million barrels of water every day.

But of course we really don't export that water. It's far too toxic to be allowed into the states even if that option was economically viable and it's not. So they get the oil, we get the waste water. Some producers such as Syncrude now manage to recycle their water up to eighteen times. That really does cut down on their freshwater consumption but the downside is that when that exhausted water finally does reach the tailing ponds, it carries many times higher levels of toxins and carcinogens than less recycled water. There's less of it but it's far more lethal.

Let's talk about tailing ponds, the reservoirs where the toxic sludge is held. When implemented, the engineers believed the "tailings" - sand, clay, leftover bitumen and the associated heavy metals and toxins would settle to the bottom in a few years leaving water that could be rehabilitated. Turns out they were wrong. Now it's looking increasingly likely that settling could take centuries, possibly a millennium, and even then - who knows?

"Ponds" now there's about as pastoral a word as you can find. Think Henry Fonda in On Golden Pond, think Henry David Thoreau's Walden Pond. Think again. Think instead of China's Three Gorges Dam which is poised to overtake the Athabasca tailing ponds as the planet's largest man made reservoir. When you visualize a pond, do you form a mental image of placid waters held back by an earthen dam more than 300-feet in height? That's 325 feet to be exact, grown somewhat from the 40-feet initially thought necessary by the engineers who designed it. Try to picture an earthen berm that's as high as a 30-story building and stretches for two miles. Now can you understand how Athabasca's tailing ponds are visible to the naked eye from the space shuttle? Now imagine those earthen containment berms shifting, actually moving, and constantly degrading.

There are two especially nasty carcinogens in Athabasca pond tailings - polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) and napthenic acids. The US EPA found that most napthenic acids produce skin cancers in any creatures exposed to them. Napthenic acids are sometimes extracted from oil to produce wood preservatives and fungicides. They also kill fish and most aquatic life on contact. This toxic witches brew is currently leaking back into the Athabasca river at a volume of 18-gallons per second. That's 18-gallons of concentrated, lethal toxins every second. That's 86,400 X 18-gallons of raw, carcinogenic toxin each and every day. One million, five hundred fifty thousand, two hundred gallons per day.

Now about that 300 foot plus wall. It's experiencing "deformation creep." Tailing ponds expert Dr. Norbert Morgenstern describes deformation creep as movement in a dam's foundation. Back when he was working for the European Union, Morganstern described tailing pond reliability as, "among the lowest of earth structures" and warned that "a well-intentioned corporation employing apparently well-qualified consultants is not adequate insurance against serious incidents." Since his EU days Morganstern has become one of those consultants himself - in Alberta - and doesn't think any of his conclusions apply to Alberta's ponds.

Of course what could go wrong? A lot. Nikiforuk writes:

"Engineers and ecologists agree that the tailing ponds pose a substantial risk to Canada's largest river basin. 'The longer the tailings sit there, the more likely there will be a major weather event and a big dyke failure,' predicts Bruce Peachey of New Paradigm Engineering. 'If any of those [tailing ponds]= were ever to breach and discharge into the river, the world would forever forget about the Exxon Valdez,' adds the University of Alberta's [eminent hydrologist] David Schindler. (the Valdez released about eleven million gallons of crude oil into Prince William Sound. ...PAH concentrations alone in the tar ponds represent about three thousand Valdezes.)"

This is just a glimpse at the tailing ponds nightmare and it's going to get worse, much worse. After the most easily extracted bitumen is exhausted it's going to become even harder, and much more water and natural gas intensive, to go after the rest. Recycle as they must, the Tar Sands developments will be producing far more, vastly more toxic waste water over the next two decades. Is it any wonder that politicians of flimsy integrity avoid talking about this?

I can't begin to address here the other environmental calamities spawned by the Athabasca Tar Sands - the depletion of freshwater and natural gas reserves, the acid rain that sweeps into Saskatchewan and Manitoba, provincial and federal governments that rubber stamp industry approvals and fail to maintain even rudimentary monitoring of the environmental impacts of the Tar Sands and so much more.

The tragedy is that we are forced to rely entirely on entirely unreliable people to represent our interests and our nation's interests and to act responsibly to redress potential calamity before it can happen. We have to rely on self-serving political reprobates like Harper and Ignatieff so utterly devoid of the decency and integrity as to treat Athabasca as anything more than a political issue to be weighed on political costs and advantages.

Michael Ignatieff proclaims the Athabasca Tar Sands the beating heart of the Canadian economy for the 21st century and a veritable key to national unity. That's the talk of a craven hack who puts his personal political fortunes in direct conflict with the welfare of the nation and people he pleads to be allowed to lead. So long as this toxic mentality prevails, Ignatieff is not fit to lead the Liberal Party of Canada and the Liberals are not fit to govern our country. It's that plain.

Can We Force Journalists to Tell the Truth?

Journalism has taken some big hits over the past two or three decades. Especially in the United States, factual reportage has been horribly degraded by the arrival of clowns like Geraldo, O'Reilly and most of the rest of the crew at Fox News. Most of these lowlifes defend themselves be crawling under the cloak of what they like to call "advocacy journalism."

There is plenty of room for advocacy across the political spectrum but in journalism it can be a lot like hosting an open bar at an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting.

You're probably familiar with the line that goes "you're entitled to your own opinion, but you're not entitled to your own facts." Too often in advocacy journalism facts are discarded for a wilfully fictitious narrative that's presented to the audience as fact. What could be the purpose of this but to mislead the public and distort their view of reality?

Some years ago I watched a chilling interview with a top Republican communications strategist. This seemingly nice enough fellow described a technique we all saw played out when John Kerry was "swiftboated" so that his combat record in Vietnam eclipsed George w. Bush's shameless draft dodge into the decidedly non-combat Texas Air National Guard.

The record of the American media during the runup to and the first couple of years of the Iraq war was a near-complete disgrace. They displayed a gullibility akin to collaboration, unquestioningly feeding the Bush administration's obvious lies to a traumatized American public. It was a confidence job, a hustle of proportions not seen since Germany in the 30's. Only one key American media outlet, McClatchey Newspapers, (formerly Knight Ridder), stepped back, scrutinized their government's claims and arguments and pronounced them untrue or at least unreliable. McClatchey's record stands as a powerful indictment of everyone else - print, television and radio. Among the biggest liars was FOX which had something like two-thirds of its audience believing America had found Saddam's weapons of mass destruction two years after the White House had to admit it goofed.

Today, America's (and, to some extent, Canada's) corporatist media are powerfully engaged in the war against the global warming science movement. The darlings of the denialist community, the corporatist media effectively collaborate with the denialists by often presenting them as on an equal footing with the climatologists despite the lack of any compelling research refuting the theory of global warming. Second, even third-rate hacks are treated as credible authorities which, boiled down, is really just facilitating lies and perpetuating falsehood.

It is a process of "growing" a lie. It begins with alternative media, talk radio for example, where a lie is birthed in the form of speculation or opinion. Mere gossip is entirely suitable. Once it has spread widely enough through the advocacy media, it's picked up by cable outlets like Fox where it is initially presented as "so and so says this" - opinion - until it's said often enough that it is grown from rumour into supposed fact. Once it gathers enough momentum with the spinmeisters at FOX et al, eventually it reaches the mainstream media who run it simply to be seen to have missed the story. And once it's printed in The New York Times, it is fact at least to an overwhelming segment of the voting public.

It's a carefully calibrated technique that targets the public to render them insensible. It's a powerful act of aggression that preys on the public by manipulating their fears and anger and frustration. It's a despicable process practised by vermin like Murdoch and they do it because no one - NO ONE - truly calls them on it at least no one sufficiently powerful.

There are a few web sites like Media Matters (www.mediamatters.org), The Center for Public Inegrity (www.publicintegrity.org) and the Center for Media and Democracy that operates PR Watch (www.prwatch.org) and Source Watch (www.sourcewatch.org) that are fighting back to peel away the layers of deception that permeate America's media. If you're not familiar with these organizations you should take the time to check them out. While they're decidedly progressive, they show that when the Right plays with facts it's invariably because they don't want the public armed with the truth. After all, what do oligarchs fear most but the public?

Maybe it's time we had an effective accreditation service governing journalists. Accredited, legitimate journalists would be required to stick to facts. Wilfully spreading falsehoods would be grounds for forfeiture of accreditation. That doesn't mean a journo can't work for the Right or the Left or any group in between. It simply means that lying in order to manipulate the public won't be tolerated. If you know or ought to know the truth but peddle something else as fact instead, you lose your accreditation. You're no longer a journalist, you're something else.

News organizations would be encouraged to post a reporter's accreditation in order to assure their customer/audience of that journalist's integrity and reliability. Better yet, truly credible news organizations would have the necessary incentive to uphold the reputation of their journalists against the inevitable attacks of Murdoch's minions and their ilk.

We're facing a century of enormous challenges and if, as societies, we're to meet those challenges we cannot tolerate a manipulated, deceived and unaware public. We simply can't afford to let this rot stand unchallenged. Having said that, I fear we're a long way off from realizing the threat we face from what passes for modern journalism.

One Bourbon, One Shot and One Beer

They never got much beyond opening for The Rolling Stones. You may remember them for "Bad to the Bone." These guys used to show up at a squeezed capacity, Kerrisdale Cyclone Taylor Arena year, after year, after year. And they always put on a show. (the song begins @ 3:35 and continues to the end.

Putting Afghan Corruption in Perspective

Afghan state corruption undermines everything positive we've tried to do there for the past decade. We're so understrength that we have no means to police the police, no way to imprison the gaolers, no possibility of governing the rulers.

We hear a lot about corruption, especially the practise of bribery, but how bad is it? Here are two figures published in today's Guardian that put it in shocking perspective.

- Average value of bribes paid in 2009 - $156
- Average per capita income that year - $502

Now, if you have to get by without a third of your total income just to get by with the cops and bureaucrats, how loyal are you going to be to the government that robs you?

In a recent survey of Afghans, the judiciary and the police were identified as the two most corrupt institutions in Karzai's Afghanistan. This is what our forces are fighting and dying to prop up, the government we're banking on. Madness.

She's Back, Right on Time

It seems as though we just got rid of El Nino or, as scientists called the latest one, El Nino Modokai (same, but different). Now we're told El Nino's ugly stepsister, La Nina, has moved in bringing her own basket of global grief. From the UN Humanitarian Affairs Office, Irin:

The La Niña phenomenon has officially arrived and disaster response teams around the world might need to brace themselves for heavier monsoons, bigger and more frequent hurricanes, and angrier cyclones.

...The National Hurricane Centre at the US government's National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has been expecting a La Niña to occur, and by May 2010 predicted a 70 percent chance that there would be 14 to 23 named storms, with wind speeds of more than 62km per hour. This is far more than the average of 11 named storms during the hurricane season in the Atlantic region, which began in June.

In Canada, La Nina generally brings cold, snowy winters.

Climategate - the New Yardstick of Willful Stupidity

Willful, that's right. Any global warming denialist who raises the University of East Anglia Climate Research Unit's hacked e-mails as supposed proof of a scientific conspiracy that proves global warming is an elaborate hoax is a goddamned liar. Four separate investigations into the e-mails and the scientists behind them have totally cleared the University, its Climate Research Unit as well as professor Phil Jones and his colleagues.

While the latest report, the result of a six month inquiry by senior British public servant, Sir Muir Russell, concluded the "rigour and honesty" of the scientists was beyond doubt and the allegations that they sought to subvert the peer review process to censor criticism were utterly groundless, the scientists were criticized for being "unhelpful and defensive" in responding to Freedom of Information requests from the denialist trolls.

There it is, game, set and match. It's over. There was no conspiracy. There was no hoax, no coverup, no subversion of the peer review process. That was all crap, from the beginning, and if you're too lazy or too ignorant to understand that, well that just means you're full of crap yourself.

When Generals Look at Global Warming, Watch Out

Climate change is for loonie lefties, right? Yeah, sure. Watch this clip (h/t Mind of Dan) and then ask yourself what kind of cretins we have in those Fossil Fuelers leading the Conservative and Liberal parties in Canada. Harper, and his fellow Oilhead, Ignatieff, are doing our Canada and our grandchildren's Canada no favours.

Matt Taibbi Nails Lara Logan

Matt Taibbi has just released his primer on the rot that has befallen what passes for journalism these days in a piece entitled "Lara Logan, You Suck."

It's the story of Rolling Stone reporter Michael Hastings, whose account of backroom chatter led to the sacking of General Stan McChrystal, and CBS chief foreign correspondent and Pentagon back scratcher, Lara Logan, who castigated Hastings for not playing ball with his military betters.

"Here's CBS's chief foreign correspondent saying out loud on TV that when the man running a war that's killing thousands of young men and women every year steps on his own dick in front of a journalist, that journalist is supposed to eat the story so as not to embarrass the flag."

Read it here

Eww, Grandpa's Got the Clap Again!

Don't believe the "golden years" bullshit. There's nothing nice about getting on except, perhaps, the alternative.

Modern prescription and over-the-counter medications do help... with the arthritis and irregularity, even breathing. And then there's Viagra, the miracle answer to flagging... well, you know.

But, according to the Annals of Internal Medicine, Viagra is turning out to be a double-edged sword (pardon the pun). From Reuters:

"...the rate of sexually transmitted diseases (STDs) in older men taking erectile dysfunction drugs like Viagra is twice as high as in their non-medicated peers.

In both groups, however, the numbers are swelling. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, there were more than six new cases of STDs per 10,000 men over 40 in 2008, up almost 50 percent since 1996.

"Younger adults have far more STDs than older adults, but the rates are growing at far higher rates in older adults," said Dr. Anupam B. Jena of Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, who led the study.

While the reasons for this development aren't well understood, he said more divorces and better health might have conspired to boost sexual prowess and activity among graying heads.

The problem, however, is that older adults appear to flaunt safe sex practices. For instance, the researchers note, 50-year-olds are six times less likely to use a condom than men in their 20s."

So, if you can't figure out what to get your geriatric lothario this Christmas, consider stuffing his sock with condoms.

Making the Tar Sands a Paying Proposition

When Canadian politicians gaze upon the scarred surface of the Athabasca Tar Sands they see wealth, not cost. They see a windfall bounty just waiting to flood into federal and Alberta government coffers and what's more appealing to a second-rate politician than free money?

These hacks - Harper, Stelmach, Ignatieff - adore free money so much that they're willing to see it where it doesn't exist. That would be Athabasca itself.

To create the oillusion of free, "help yourself" money, these greasy pols willingly but duplicitously overlook real costs going unpaid by Big Oil mining the bitumen pits of the Tar Sands.

Let's begin with water, the billions of barrels of freshwater Big Oil draws from the Athabasca and Peace rivers each year to extract and process oil sludge. Now if there's one thing global warming has already plain proved around the world it's that water ain't free. Why just ask the World Water Council and its World Water Forum, a front group for multinationals questing to privatize water resources in every corner of the world they can reach. These corporate giants know there's gold in water.

Alberta knows it's facing a grave water shortage problem over the coming decade or two. The province even has plans to divert northern watersheds to the thirsty south. So this would seem as good a time as any to begin putting a fair dollar figure on all that water being sucked into the gaping maw of Big Oil in Athabasca. I mean, giving those industrial giants such vast amounts of free water is handing them a massive subsidy, isn't it? And massive subsidies are socialist, aren't they? And Alberta of all places utterly rejects socialism, doesn't it? Or is socialism just dandy when it's for the uber-rich oil industry? Then again, it's not as though the Alberta Conservatives don't already have the oil patch in the provincial thumbscrews with that massive one percent royalty is it?

And maybe, while they're at it, Alberta should also begin sending invoices for the environmental costs of those ever-growing and highly toxic tailing ponds where the waste water of tar sanding ends up. These pitch ponds are big enough they're visible to the naked eye from the space shuttle. They're also increasing Big Oil's liabilities each and every day by leaking toxic chemicals into the region's groundwater too. Does anyone think that, if Big Oil had an affordable answer to its tailing pond nightmares, it wouldn't already be cleaning them up?

Giving Big Oil a pass on those tailing ponds is another form of subsidy, isn't it? And it's probably a really massive subsidy too, isn't it? But wait, Big Oil has solemnly promised to clean up these tailing ponds before they leave, hasn't it? And they're not the first major mining operation to promise to get to their tailings just as soon as they're done, right? And how well has that worked out in the past? Not so good? Hmmm.

There's really no getting around it. If Alberta fairly priced its water and put Big Oil on a "pay as you go" basis for its water consumption and its toxic leavings, bitumen's house of cards might just collapse. But if there's one thing Big Oil has learned from a century of global petroleum exploitation, it's that there's one thing they can always rely on - there'll always be plenty of greasy politicians around to do their bidding, politicians that can be bought off with beads and trinkets.

Just How Stupid is Stephen Harper? Ask the Pharoahs.

Stephen Harper truly exemplifies what happens when dogma trumps reality. The clown prince is so doctrinaire that he can't help himself, even on the basics, even with a graduate degree in economics (albeit from the University of Calgary).

Prime Minister StupidStick revealed all when he slashed the GST upon coming to power. That move was not only breathtakingly stupid, it offended the very wisdom of the Pharoahs. Let me explain.

The Pharoahs built a mighty Egyptian empire replete with temples, palaces, the pyramids, and a massive, all-powerful army. All of that was based on just a few things - grain, silos and the good common sense to store a surplus of the first safely in the second. The operative word here is "surplus" which means being more than or in excess of what is needed or required.

When he became Jean Chretien's finance minister, Paul Martin understood the wisdom of the Pharoahs and put it into practice. He balanced the budget, began paying down debt and kept taxes high enough to amass a healthy surplus. There it is again, that word "surplus."

Why is having a surplus so important? When you're amassing that surplus the importance may not be obvious. It's importance becomes apparent, even to stupid people like Harper, only when something goes wrong, only when it's needed.

The Pharoahs established state-run silos to hold all that surplus grain so they had plenty on hand in the event of a crop failure or when needed to feed workers building those stone edifices or when they wanted to send an army to conquer the neighbours. It kept everybody happy and productive and, before long, Egypt had an enormous and powerful empire. Without that surplus grain securely tucked away in those silos, the Pharoah's Egypt would have probably resembled an ancient version of today's Egypt, only without all the great monuments and pyramids.

When Pharoah Steve came to the throne in Ottawa, however, he looked on the brimming silos he inherited from Martin with disdain. He declared that the state had no right to a surplus, to take more or in excess of what is needed or required, and so he cut the GST, once and once again, and began emptying the silos. Then, just as the silos approached empty, a great and powerful global meltdown swept in from the south. Steve had no grain to feed his people and so he went begging to those who had full silos and began borrowing to make good the advantages he had squandered.

If the ancient Pharoahs were to behold our poor Stephen, what would they think? I expect not much at all.

Our Worthless Servants or Furious Steve Runs Afoul of the Gospel of Matthew

We missed it the first time but we'll get there eventually because, if we don't, the consequences will be unbearable.

Do you think your society can function without quality infrastructure - proper roads, a modern rail system, a state of the art electricity grid, schools, hospitals, airports and so on? If you do, you've probably never visited a truly backward country, the sort where electricity is available sporadically, where the roads are as much pothole as pavement, and where already short supplies of safe freshwater bubble to the surface from broken mains to run in streams down to sewers. That's the sort of world you get without adequate infrastructure. I have seen these places and marvelled at their ruin.

That's what made me so damned mad at Steve Harper and his junior partner, Mike Ignatieff, when they joined together in 2009 to foist on our country and our people what was perhaps the worst stimulus/recovery budget imaginable. It was a haphazard, thoughtless, on the fly fiasco. Sure it pumped money into the economy, billions of dollars borrowed by Ottawa on our behalf and pledged to the credit of taxpayers both existing and to come. But it was money squandered when what we needed was money invested.

The billions those two chumps dumped onto the street were akin to dollars thrown into the air above an expectant crowd. Some got a lot, some got a bit and an awful lot of people got nothing. But we made sure that each of them got something - an IOU for all that money plus interest that everyone of them is going to have to repay through their taxes.

And what did we expect them to do with that money? For many it was home improvements - new windows, a bit of landscaping, a water heater or a furnace. There was also the new deck for the cottage, a new dock perhaps. But if you didn't own a home or a cottage or even if you did but didn't have the up front cash to fund the renos, well you were probably out of luck. The race, after all, goes to the richest, no?

And now that all that money is gone, pumped into the economy, when will all those new decks and docks start paying dividends back into the federal treasury? What sort of revenue stream can we project for them over the next ten, twenty, forty years? I suppose I don't need to answer that. When you squander your paycheque in a bar you usually don't have much left over to show for it except, perhaps, the hangover.

But what if the federal fund factory, the parliamentary pig pen, had decided not to chip in for Fred's new deck but to spend that money itself? What if they had decided to do something with that money that would benefit all Canadians in all regions? What if they decided to invest that money into things that would pay dividends for decades to come when the bill for all that spending came due?

Isn't there something in the Bible about three guys and some easy cash, the "Parable of the Talents"? Hey, wait a second! Why don't we ask Steve? He's really into that Bible stuff isn't he? I guess it's been a while since he read Matthew 25:14-30 or maybe that smug slacker dozed off when they went through that parable.

"...throw that worthless servant outside, into the darkness,

where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth"

Gee Steve and Mike, I think that "worthless servant" business fits both of you like a glove (but especially you Steve because you're supposed to know better). We're the master, you took our money borrowed by pledging our credit, and, instead of investing it, you pissed it all away. Unlike the worthless servant in the Bible, you didn't even bury it in the ground for safekeeping. You just squandered it. Weeping and gnashing of teeth in the darkness somehow doesn't seem quite enough for your kind - but it's a good start.

No, we need a change of servants, sooner rather than later. We still need government stimulus spending and, if what's looming on the horizon in California, Illinois, Arizona and Washington plus most of Europe is any indication, we're in for a bumpy ride for years to come. We're all going to take a kicking but I figure that the countries that come through this the best will be those who used the opportunity of the global doldrums to reinvest in their infrastructure, to position their nations to be capable of landing on their feet when that opportunity returns.

California At the Abyss - Aahrnold Wants State Employees on Minimum Wage

We tend to think of America's debt crisis as Washington's problem but a lot of state governments are as deeply in the red - or worse. Arizona and California are real fiscal freak shows right at the moment.

The latest spectacle comes from California where outgoing governator, Arnold Schwarzenegger, has ordered state Controller John Chiang to put 200,000 state employees on minimum wage - bread and water - this month. That would drop them down to the federally mandated $7.25 an hour.

Chiang says he won't do it without a court order.

Six bargaining units, representing 37,000 workers, that have already folded to the governor's concession demands won't be affected. The big six holdouts, however, could be in for a rougher ride.

Christopher Hitchens Battles Throat Cancer

The decades of hard drinking and heavy smoking seem to have caught up to Chris Hitchens. The sometimes grating and usually controversial writer/pundit announced he was cancelling his book tour for his new work "Hitch 22" to undergo chemotherapy for esophageal cancer.

Read more here

See, I Said It Was a Coalition, One in Which the Junion Partner Does as It's Told

Just yesterday in my dirge to Canada Day, I wrote of the de facto Conservative-Liberal coalition:

"...In Parliament we discovered that Stephen Harper hasn't been running a minority government after all. It turns out Steve has had a coalition government thanks to a Liberal opposition whose only demonstrated skill this past year has been rolling over. When Mr. Ignatieff wasn't busy steering the LPC to the right in pursuit of the far-right Harper, he was either quite shamelessly backing Harper or simply skipping critical votes. You hand the guy the keys to the party of Laurier, Pearson and Trudeau and this is what you get? Un-believable."

Turns out, I'm not a lone voice on this one. Paul Wells, writing in MacLeans, says that Harper is just fine with his parliamentary toadie, Michael Ignatieff:

"... Harper and his junior coalition partner, Michael Ignatieff, are too smart to be thrown off balance. So, just before he welcomed the world’s leaders and southern Ontario’s riot police to the Metro Toronto Convention Centre, Harper permitted himself to revel in the Conservative-Liberal coalition’s latest accomplishments. “I think in the end we actually got some pretty good results,” Harper told reporters from Reuters. “Particularly in the closing days. As you know, we got the budget implementation bill through.”

One bill? That’s all he has to show for a year’s strife? But this was no ordinary bill. “The budget bill was wide-ranging legislation that had a lot, not just of important budgetary measures, but important measures for the Canadian economy. So I think the passage of the budget bill, in and of itself, made the parliamentary sessions productive.”

He listed other measures the opposition had caved on, like refugee-system reform and a measure making it harder for convicts to get pardons. (The opposition never fails to collapse in the face of each new Conservative tough-on-crime measure. Harper should recognize their contribution by hanging photos of Ignatieff and Jack Layton in every new federal prison.)

But the budget was the main ingredient. “I know we’ve been criticized for how much was in that budget bill,” Harper said. “But putting a lot in that budget bill effectively ensured—passing it ensured a productive parliamentary session.” This was a slip-up, I believe, for it marked the first time Harper admitted he used the implementation bill to smuggle a bunch of other stuff into law.

And what an impressive list of achievements it was. Bill C-9 enabled all the usual taxing and spending, but it also removed new energy projects from the purview of the Canadian Environmental Assessment Act and gave the job for assessing them to the National Energy Board. To make that move even while the world’s attention was transfixed by the BP spill in the Gulf of Mexico was quite a feat. Harper couldn’t have done it without the Liberal members of his coalition.

Throw in provisions for the sale of Atomic Energy of Canada Ltd. and an end to the Canada Post monopoly on overseas mail. The Canada Post plan was introduced as a separate, stand-alone bill in 2008 and 2009, only to die on the Order Paper when Harper called the 2008 election and prorogued Parliament a year later.

When the 900-page Budget Implementation Act, with amendments to five dozen laws, passed the Commons early in June because not enough Liberals showed up to vote against it, Liberal Sen. Pierrette Ringuette swore it wouldn’t be the same story in the Senate. “The Liberal senators are not rubber-stampers of the leadership,” Ringuette said. “We have a mandate to do sober second review of legislation for Canadians, and we will fulfill our responsibility.” Then the Budget Implementation Act passed the Senate later in June because not enough Liberals showed up to vote against it.

I'm sorry, Liberal faithful, but when you let the schoolyard bully help himself to your lunch money you haven't got much to gripe about when you start getting bitchslapped. Under the rule of this professorial charlatan you're not fit to form a government, you're not even fit to serve the country as our official opposition. You're a goddamned joke.

Russia Takes Floating Nuclear Power Plants to Arctic

When one thinks of Russia and nuclear reactors what first pops to mind except Chernobyl? That little mishap was the mother of all reactor disasters. The destroyed reactor, the nearby town and neighbouring region remain highly radioactive and abandoned.

So word that Russia is now deploying the first of what will be a fleet of floating nuclear reactor power plants to the Arctic Ocean is raising a few eyebrows. Greenpeace has dubbed the first reactor barge, the Akademik Lomonosov, the world's most dangerous nuclear project in a decade. And the Lomonosov is just the first of a fleet of reactor barges planned to be stationed across Russia's northern coastline.

The first barge reactor won't be idle for long. It's slated to power a Russian high-Arctic oil and gas drilling operation. Beyond powering the oil and gas stampede to the Arctic the Russians claim their barge reactors are just the thing for the developing world too. Russia's minister for nuclear energy Sergei Kiriyenko claimed to have "numerous orders" for the floating power plants.

For those of you who worry about the fragile Arctic ecosystem, well - sorry.

Welcome to Black Market Canada

Harmonized sales tax descends on Ontario and British Columbia today. According to some estimates that'll mean an additional $500-800 a year out of the pockets of the average BC family. But will it?

The tax is enormously unpopular. The way the BC Libs snuck it in and then lied through their teeth about it that's entirely predictable. What's also predictable is that plenty of people will be looking for ways to trim back that tax bill, to recoup those extra dollars they'll lose at the cash registers. We'll do what people in other countries have done for centuries. Welcome to Black Market Canada where deals are done in cash and the taxman is cut out of the loop.

The Canadian Press reports that the anticipated blowback to the HST has a lot of the service industry very, very worried:

Craig Bennett is sick of hearing customers threaten to take their roofing requests to under-the-table competitors and he believes business is only going to get worse for legit services now that the harmonized sales tax has officially hit in Ontario and British Columbia.

"There will be a thriving black market," says Bennett, deputy director of Toronto-based Avenue Road Roofing. "I think (the HST is) going to be wreaking havoc for people in the service industry," he adds.

...service-oriented business owners are skeptical about any benefits because the HST will be attached to a host of their offerings — from home maintenance to massage therapy to tennis lessons — that were previously exempt from the provincial tax.

Stephen Dupuis, president of the Building Industry and Land Development Association, says the underground economy is already a huge problem in the renovation and home repair industries, but will grow even more when the HST comes in, just as it did when the GST hit in 1991, he says.

There's a lesson to this. People pay tax by consent. If they don't consent to a tax, if they don't consider a tax legitimate, they will find ways around it or ways to offset it. Once under the table cash deals become acceptable in the public's mind, it's government that has a problem.

Exposing "Climate Risks" to Investors

FTSE Group is now helping investors sort out which companies are the safest bets for their carbon emissions policies. The new FTSE index rates coporations, by sector, according to their carbon footprint. The investment advisory group warns that, in the coming carbon reduction era, the cleaner the company, the safer the investment.

FTSE Group is an independent rating company jointly owned by The Financial Times and the London Stock Exchange. It maintains over 120,000 equity, bond and alternative asset class indices. From The Guardian:

The two new indices, the FTSE CDP Carbon Strategy All-Share Index and the FTSE CDP Carbon Strategy 350 Index, have been developed in partnership with the Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP) investor group and analyst firm ENDS Carbon.
The indices work by analysing the carbon strategies and "tilting" their rating based on their exposure to climate change related risks such as proposed carbon pricing mechanisms. As a result investors will be able to quickly assess which firms and sectors are most at risk from climate-related impacts.

For example, companies in carbon-intensive sectors such as aviation, oil and gas, mining, and electric power will be subject to "tilts" that are 10 times greater than firms operating in lower risk industries.

"By applying forward-looking analysis, we see how companies will be impacted by climate change in the future and those demonstrating strong carbon performance will benefit from higher rankings within the indices," explained Paul Simpson, chief operating officer at the CDP.

Bringing individual corporations' carbon emissions performance into the open and enabling major investors to factor that into their long-term decision making could be very helpful in the same sense as American insurance companies validated the reality of global warming by refusing to write hurricane coverage throughout the Gulf states and the entire American Atlantic seaboard.

Canada Day Indeed

Here on the island it seems nature has dished up perfect weather for this Canada Day - grey, damp and oh so somber. That seems appropriate to where our country has gone this past year.

Perhaps Canada Day should be for more than a day off work, a barbecue, beer and fireworks. Maybe it should also be a day for taking stock of our land and where we've taken it or allowed it to be taken since earlier Canada Days.

What do we have in the "plus" column?

Well, we had a pretty good Winter Olympics games. Canada did astonishingly well and even those of us who are waiting for the bill felt good about the performances of our athletes, especially the men's and women's hockey teams. Sidney Crosby sure came through with the goods, didn't he?

There were signs of life in the Canadian economy. Our country appears to have taken far less of a hit from the mega-recession than other Western nations.

How does that stack up against the "minus" column? Where to begin?

In Parliament we discovered that Stephen Harper hasn't been running a minority government after all. It turns out Steve has had a coalition government thanks to a Liberal opposition whose only demonstrated skill this past year has been rolling over. When Mr. Ignatieff wasn't busy steering the LPC to the right in pursuit of the far-right Harper, he was either quite shamelessly backing Harper or simply skipping critical votes. You hand the guy the keys to the party of Laurier, Pearson and Trudeau and this is what you get? Un-believable.

We learned throughout the year that Harper and Ignatieff weren't just similar but absolutely identical when it came to one thing - the Athabasca Tar Sands. It must've made Harper's icy heart melt, just a little bit, to hear the Liberal leader pledge his party's troth to the bitumen fields of Alberta. Together, hand in hand, true Tar Sanders, avowed Fossil Fuelers, diehard Oilheads, happily willing to accept Big Oil's NSF cheques for carbon sequestration and site remediation, no questions asked. It must bring tears of joy to every oil executive around the world. Even Dick Cheney would be proud of "The Twins."

The Twins brought us Canada's recession/stimulus budget or, as I like to call it, the "Pinata Budget." Those closest to the paper-mache mule when it broke, those fastest on the draw, could scramble in to get the candy. The Harper-Ignatieff budget put a lot of decks on cottages, literally pissed billions of dollars down the drain to be repaid, with interest, by future taxpayers. Instead of spending that borrowed fortune on investments that would return dividends to the country (as in "everybody") for years, decades to come, they shoved it inside a paper mache donkey, hit it with a stick and watched the scramble to make it disappear.

We could have financed a new electric grid or a proper trans-Canada rail line or so many other bold, visionary projects that would have left the country better off long into the future. We didn't. Steve didn't have the courage to spend that money himself and Iggy was too busy writing a book about his maternal lineage to come up with any ideas of his own, so he had to help Harper foist that travesty on the Canadian people. Well done your Igness!

Canada 2009-2010 was a year that saw our Furious Leader, with the quiet assistance of his sidekick, move to shelve any meaningful government action on global warming. Not only did Harper duck any significant action to cut Canada's carbon emissions but he also simply turned his back on our country and our people on measures to help Canadians understand and adapt to the warming that's coming thanks to the CO2 already emitted. And where was the spineless sop of a Liberal leader, the guy who collects his paycheque to oppose Harper's chicanery? Nowhere to be seen, that's where. Because the moment anyone talks tough about slashing carbon emissions and adaptation measures the Tar Sands pop into the limelight, something neither of these scoundrels wants to invite.

Canada at 132 should have been the year when we all figured out that the West has done about all it can for - and to - Afghanistan; that we've already stayed too long for any good we've done and getting out in 2011 isn't just the smart thing to do, it's the right thing. But then the Liberal brain trust figured we should stay, just not in a "combat" role as though in Afghanistan every role isn't a combat role. Once again the IgLibs demonstrate that their capacity for stupidity is unbridled. Train what? These Afghan soldiers desert at almost exactly the same rate as we train them. Those that stay often turn out to be dullards and hash heads. Worse yet, a US government audit of the Afghan National Army just reported that, after nine years of Western presence, there's not one (zip, nada, zilch) unit of the Afghan National Army today capable of operating independently! Not one unit. And yet the IgLibs want Canadian soldiers left to the mercies of suicide bombers and IEDs to "train" Afghan forces. Seriously, this is a party that needs to be euthanized.

2009-10 was also the year Canada gained and lost in the wildlife department. We still haven't figured out just what happened to millions upon millions of BC wild salmon that didn't return to spawn but we did get to greet the startling arrival of the red devils of Baja, the giant and voracious Humboldt squid in their hundreds, likely thousands, to the waters of Vancouver Island.

I'd better close the "minus" column before this gets any worse.

As Canada begins her 133rd year, I look out at a country that has lost its way. We're being run into the ground by a hard right theocratic movement that conceals itself in the false flag of moderation. At a moment when my country has never been in such need of a forceful opposition to stand up for the country, our people and our values, we get Ignatieff.

There was a time when it was easy to be proud of being a Canadian. When living abroad, in the states or Europe, my country was universally respected for its modesty, for its promise and because it could be generally counted on to do the right thing. Harper and Ignatieff have stripped us of a lot of that hard-earned legacy and they're not nearly done yet either.

Around the world the ravages of global warming are setting in and spreading with an increasing intensity. People, too many people, are already dying and suffering and being displaced from ancestral homelands turned uninhabitable and their numbers will only increase for the rest of your and my lifetimes. Get ready for it, this is just the start. Our Western world seems to be sharply divided into the "steady as she goes," growth at any cost freaks on one side and, on the other, people of conscience who fiercely reject the idea that we have any right to inflict the brutal consequences of our greed on the least advantaged, most vulnerable. You don't get to sit this one out. You have to choose sides and if you don't choose "B", you're definitely an "A".

Afghanistan has shown us that there are are things that we truly don't understand, that we simply cannot fix. Yet on the infinitely more dangerous question of global warming, we're content to turn our backs on our own species, mankind itself. As we draw ever nearer, perilously close in fact, to several tipping points any of which could initiate runaway global warming; catastrophic feedback climate change beyond our control, those who have seized control of my country eagerly look to expand, multifold, the most environmentally devastating fossil fuel source on my planet. Theirs is a crime against humanity.

These foul creatures of power have disgraced my Canada. Now the world views us as a pariah. Canada, a pariah state! We may avoid looking into the mirror but the world sees us as we are - a greedy, selfish people whose leaders covertly do everything in their power to scuttle meaningful, international action to slash carbon emissions for the sake of a few decades of Tar Sands windfall wealth.

I might as well get it out. I am not proud of my Canada any longer. I am deeply, profoundly ashamed of this Canada. I reject this Canada and I despise those Oilhead reprobates who willingly transform our country into a pariah state.

Canada Day? I'll pass.