We Just Keep Breaking the Wrong Records

We can't say we weren't warned - again and again and again. Think of it as being parked smack atop a level crossing and deciding to enjoy a leisurely picnic lunch. Somebody in the back seat says, "hey, what's that?" and then, "it's a train." A couple of minutes later another warning, "look, it's almost on us. We've got to go." And then the driver looks up just as the train smashes into the side of the car.

Now the World Meteorological Organization is sounding "Last Call."

Greenhouse gas levels in the atmosphere have reached a record high in 2014, the World Meteorological Organisation says.

Graphs issued by the United Nations agency showed levels of carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas, climbing steadily towards the 400 parts per million (ppm) level, having hit a new record every year since reliable records began in 1984.

Carbon dioxide levels averaged 397.7 ppm in 2014 but briefly breached the 400 ppm barrier in the northern hemisphere in early 2014, and again globally in early 2015.

The rise in carbon dioxide levels was being amplified by higher levels of water vapour, which were in turn rising because of carbon dioxide emissions, the WMO said.

Levels of the other two major man-made greenhouse gases, methane and nitrous oxide, also continued their relentless annual rise in 2014, reaching 1833 parts per billion (ppb) and 327.1 ppb, respectively. Both increased at the fastest rate for a decade.

The UN panel of climate scientists estimates that concentrations of carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide are at their highest in at least 800,000 years.

Our driver, the new prime minister, the opposition leaders, and all of our premiers, will be in Paris for the December climate summit. They'll be getting the "Last Call" warning. Justin is going to decide the future of his little kids, everyone's little kids. Let's hope he sees it as their future, not their fate.

If he does want a future for all those kids, from Canada and every other country, he's going to have to act forcefully and now. He'll be up against a lot of people - people like Stephen Harper - and corporations - the Fossil Fuelers,  who are ready to write off all those kids. It's a decision that shouldn't be tough but there are plenty who are determined to see that it will be and some of those are in Justin's own party.

War As a Gesture

There's a miserable op-ed at the CBC's web site today by a Washington State University prof. going on about the moral implications of Canada's withdrawal from the air war against ISIS. The point seemed to be that there's a moral cost of staying but also a moral cost of leaving.

What a load of bollocks.

Our air war in Iraq and Syria was never really dripping with morality. The suggestion that we go into these adventures on moral considerations is a bit untenable when our record of supporting tyrannical regimes here and attacking despotic regimes there plainly refutes the idea. Let's face it, we have to check off a lot of boxes reflecting self-interest before we decide to bomb this country or that. The moral considerations are there, to be sure, but they're well down the page and often quite blurry.

Today we are led by the first true Permanent Warfare State in modern history. They decide who will be bombed, who will be spared and we say "ready, aye ready." A major problem with PermaWar is that it's afflicted with ADD, attention deficit disorder. Long before you could hope to achieve anything meaningful abroad you find you've lost the battle for hearts and minds at home.

We get into these things without knowing what victory means, what defeat might look like, or how and when we'll get out. The results: Libya, Kosovo, Afghanistan, Iraq should hardly be surprising. Their outcomes were almost pre-ordained.

We have yet to develop and implement strategies, or even tactics, to meet the demands of "new war." Old War, the state-on-state sort of thing our grandfathers fought, has given way to New War (also sometimes known as Hybrid War) in which the enemy can be a confusing blend of state actors, quasi-state and non-state actors comprised of governments, militias, rebels, insurgents, terrorists and remarkably capable and sophisticated criminal enterprises, each pursuing its own agenda and often featuring rapidly shifting and temporary alliances. The players can also migrate from place to place. You want to bomb here, they can get busy over there. How does a 2,000 pound precision-guided munition defeat that? If we look to our side's record for the past 15-years, the conclusion must be "poorly."

In the era of New War we always show up prepared to fight Old War, with neither the means nor the resolve nor even the intent of prevailing. That is war as a gesture, a statement and of all the forms of warfare that's certainly one of the most immoral.

In Flanders Fields my ass.


Update: this is certainly timely. The folks at Tomgram have just posted Greg Grandin's essay, "Kissinger, the Bombardier: How Diplomacy by Air Power Became an All-American Tradition."

The Gags are Off!

The Liberal government has taken the gags off federal scientists.

Alain Vezina, regional director of science for the Bedford Institute of Oceanography in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia, confirmed Friday morning that scientists at the institute are allowed to openly speak to media.

Vezina held a meeting this morning to brief staff on the change.

He told National Observer that the announcement was communicated to him from the assistant deputy minister of science at Fisheries and Oceans Canada (known by its old acronym for the Department of Fisheries and Oceans, DFO).

“I think it’s positive,” Vezina said. “I think we still need to work out the details. It’s very new.

"Basically what I told the staff is if you’re contacted directly by the media, let’s say you’re at a conference or a workshop, the media is there. You can talk directly. You don’t have to say, ‘I don’t have permission to speak.’”

Of Equality and Ministers of State

There's a lot of flap going about over how Justin Trudeau appointed fifteen women to his cabinet but five of them are second-tier, ministers of state, secretary of this or that. Hmm, okay.

I can't help but recall an earlier prime minister, a guy we called "Mike," and a second-tier minister of state he appointed - again and again. That guy's name was Jean.

It was Lester Pearson who appointed Jean Chretien as his parliamentary secretary in 1965. He made Chretien parliamentary secretary to Mitchell Sharp, minister of finance, in 1966.  Sharp mentored Chretien until, in January, 1968, Pearson appointed Jean Chretien minister of national revenue.

I read somewhere that Pearson knew Chretien was disappointed at being given the parliamentary secretary roles but the prime minister explained that he didn't want to put him in a minor cabinet portfolio where he might falter or fade into obscurity. The secretary of state post would give the young man political exposure while he readied himself for a power position.

Pearson knew a thing of two. He recruited, and groomed, three young men who went on to become prime ministers: Pierre Trudeau, John Turner and Jean Chretien.

"Mike" and his Proteges 

Obama Rumbles Justin. That Was Fast.

The New York Times is reporting that president Barack Obama will announce today that he's rejecting the Keystone XL pipeline proposal.

President Obama’s denial of the proposed 1,179-mile pipeline, which would have carried 800,000 barrels a day of carbon-heavy petroleum from the Canadian oil sands to the Gulf Coast, comes as he is seeking to build an ambitious legacy on climate change.

A major United Nations summit meeting on climate change will be held in Paris in December, where Mr. Obama hopes to help broker a historic agreement committing the world’s nations to enacting new policies to counter global warming. While the rejection of the pipeline would be largely symbolic, Mr. Obama has sought to telegraph to other world leaders that the United States is serious about acting on climate change.

Lyin' Brian's Thinly-Veiled Call for a Progressive Conservative Restoration

There was no sign of cash-stuffed envelopes when former Progressive Conservative prime minister, Brian Mulroney, took the podium at the Royal York to urge fellow Tories to bury the hatchet and become - although he didn't actually use the word - a bit progressive again.

Most of what Mulroney said was delivered in a subtle, backhanded sort of way.

“This is a time to heal old wounds, not to settle old scores,” he said. “There should be no ideological impediments to our welcome, no narrowness of view or vindictiveness of spirit as we review, renew and rebuild.”

 “We must approach the leadership change with prudence and care,” Mulroney said. “Time will be required to get it right.”

 Mulroney said the rebuilding will have to include policies that appeal to a wide spectrum of voters.

"No ideological impediments... no narrowness of view or vindictiveness of spirit," indeed. Hell the old bugger has just captured the essence of Harper's movement conservatism. It seems Brian thinks that's gotta go only without any settling of old scores.

Policies that appeal to a wide spectrum of voters - voters who remain inherently progressive. Yeah, okay, I get the connection. 

It sure sounds like Brian is quietly calling for a Progressive Conservative restoration. Not sure how Rona's going to like that.

A Little Electoral Trivia Courtesy of the Washington Post

Didja know, eh?

Our American cousins at the venerable Washington Post have had a look at Justin Trudeau's cabinet and discovered that Canada now has the "most Sikh" cabinet in the world.

Among the diverse crowd are four ministers of Sikh origin — a conspicuously high number when you consider that India, where most Sikhs live, only counts two Sikhs in current senior cabinet-level positions.

The instant star was defence minister Harjit Sajjan. The others?

The others are Amarjeet Sohi, sworn in as Canada's minister of infrastructure; Navdeep Bains, 38, a business school professor who now has the portfolio for innovation, science and economic development; and Bardish Chagger, 35, a daughter of Sikh immigrants who was sworn in as minister of small business and tourism.

Punjabi, the language of the Indian state that's the homeland of most Sikhs, is now effectively the third language of Canada's parliament. Nineteen Indian Canadians in total were voted into the 338-seat House of Commons in Ottawa in federal elections last month.

There you go. That should be enough to win you a free coffee bet with your buddies at Tim Hortons.

New Word - AssWhole

I seethed just a little bit in recent days listening to vanquished Tories talk about how they're going to be "nicer" people in the post-Harper future. Some of them said they were just too mean, nasty sort of - not at all like the wonderful, kind, compassionate creatures they really were inside all along.

Wait a second, they're pulling the "Good German" defence. Vee did not like to do it but vee vas only following zee orders of zee legitimate authority, der Fuhrer. Right, blame it all on Harper. No, sorry, we decided a long time ago that excuse doesn't wash. We saw enough of you, for almost a decade, to know that you never hesitated to go nasty whenever the opportunity arose. At times you got so into character you even looked deranged, unhinged.

You were a scowling, churlish bunch, always ready to crush dissent by impugning motives, branding them as "inimical" to the country, demeaning their patriotism. And now you're Good Germans indeed.

And you did it collectively, the lot of you. Now, for you to try to make Harper, your fuhrer, take the blame it simply won't fly. However I think it warrants the coining of a new noun, a collective noun to describe the rancid lot of you - "asswhole." Yes, I think that'll do nicely.

Yes, Yes, Yes!!! Conservatives Choose the Big Hair for Interim Leader

Rona Ambrose will lead the Conservatives in Parliament. Yippee!

Let the games begin.

Yes!!! New York Attorney General Launches Criminal Probe into Exxon's Climate Lies

It's one thing to knowingly deceive and confuse the public about the reality of climate change but when you're also misleading shareholders into how climate change might affect their investments that's quite another.

In a move that could ripple through the fossil fuel industry, New York Attorney General, Eric Schneiderman, has subpoenaed Exxon's records, documents and emails pertaining to climate change.

The focus includes the company’s activities dating to the late 1970s, including a period of at least a decade when Exxon Mobil funded groups that sought to undermine climate science. A major focus of the investigation is whether the company adequately warned investors about potential financial risks stemming from society’s need to limit fossil-fuel use.

Kenneth P. Cohen, vice president for public affairs at Exxon Mobil, said on Thursday that the company had received the subpoena and was still deciding how to respond.

...The people with knowledge of the New York case also said on Thursday that, in a separate inquiry, Peabody Energy, the nation’s largest coal producer, had been under investigation by the attorney general for two years over whether it properly disclosed financial risks related to climate change. That investigation has not been previously reported, and has not resulted in any charges or other legal action against Peabody.

...The Exxon Mobil investigation might expand further, to encompass other oil companies, according to the people with knowledge of the case, though no additional subpoenas have been issued to date.

There is now a solid scientific consensus that any hope we may have of keeping global warming within the 2 degree Celsius target will require that we leave about 80% of known fossil fuel reserves in the ground, unburned, and effectively stranded. The fossil fuel giants continue to carry those reserves on their books as assets and at "face value" that may be wildly overstated. This creates a "carbon bubble" that is expected to burst, literally wiping out the value of the energy giants and their shareholders' investments.

Oooh, Feel the Burn

This is making the rounds of social media. Canada's new Defence Minister, a veteran of Bosnia and three tours of Afghanistan, and his esteemed Tory predecessors.

Hmmm.. Ralph Goodale - Minister of Public Safety - Royal Canadian Mounted Police

What goes around comes around.

Recall Guiliano Zaccardelli? Canada's newly minted Minister of Public Safety sure does.  Zaccardelli was the infamous RCMP commissioner who made up spurious allegations about Goodale that were divulged to the NDP who used it to sabotage the Liberals in the 2006 election, helping Harper come to power and plunging Canada into the decade of darkness. Afterward Zaccardelli refused to answer MPs questions about the scandal. Shortly after that the bent nail commissioner got into even more trouble on the Maher Arar scandal and the RCMP pension scandal whereby he became the first commissioner in history forced to resign.

Things haven't gone too well for the RCMP ever since. Zac was replaced by the first civilian commissioner, Tory backroom operative Bill Elliott and then the current office holder, Bob Paulson, who stands to go down in history for inventing the 'immaculate bribe' charge whereby senator Mike Duffy was charged with receiving a bribe from a guy that Paulson cleared of giving a bribe, Nigel Wright.

Now Paulson is going to have to answer to Ralphie. Wonder how that's going to work out?

I Gotta Say, As Defence Ministers Go...

This guy's right up there. Congratulations Colonel Harjit Singh Sajjan, Minister of Defence:

Justin, First Thing Tomorrow Morning

Mr. Prime Minister.

First thing tomorrow morning we need you to sack the entire membership of Canada's National Energy Board, the fossil fuelers who have run the board like an agency of the Canadian Petroleum Producers Association during the Harper years.

First up, NEB CEO and Chairman, Peter Watson, the Alberta Chamber of Resources 2011 'Resource Person of the Year.' While you're at it, sack vice-chair, Lynne Mercier, 29-year veteran of Gaz Metro.

Then work your way right down through the rest of the industry shills that make up the Harper Government National Energy Facilitation Board. This is a tail wagging the dog operation and it has to be stopped in its tracks.

Sorry, Justin, But Your Old Man Stole Your Thunder

Delightful as it was to watch Justin and his inner circle stroll into Rideau Hall to be sworn in, this is how it's really done:

Richardson, Jamieson, Trudeau, Turner, Marchand and Pelletier

There's Always One Guy Who Spoils It for Everybody

In this case "it" was a re-enactment of the legendary Shootout at the OK Corral. The Spoiler was the guy who showed up with a six shooter loaded with live rounds. Oopsie!

Two people were wounded in the incident on Sunday afternoon at the old town of Tombstone, Arizona.

Ken Curtis was struck in the upper-groin area. Curtis fell to the ground and was flown to a hospital in Tucson, where he underwent surgery to remove the bullet.

Other rounds struck businesses and a female bystander.

The marshal says authorities inspected the weapon and found one live round in the cylinder along with five casings that indicated the six-shooter was filled with live rounds prior to the skit.

Tombstone authorities called it unprecedented. The Marshal's Office says Mayor Dusty Escapule advised the Tombstone Vigilante group to put future gunfight skits on hold as the investigation plays out.

It seems the errant hombre, Tom Carter, showed up late for the gig and didn't have time to have his guns inspected. The group has been staging these re-enactments since 1946.

Maggie's Drawers - Get 'Em While They're Hot

Harper loyalists struggling to find a suitable parting gift need look no further. How about a lovely pair of old Maggie's drawers?

Clothing and personal effects of Baroness Thatcher of Kesteven, The Iron Lady, will be coming up for auction at Christie's in London on December 15th.

When I read the notice what sprang to mind was the old army song, "Maggie's Drawers," dating back to the 30s. Somewhat along the lines of that naval great, "The North Atlantic Squadron," Maggie's Drawers is a thoroughly ribald, vulgar and crass little ditty that comes in several iterations, none of them remotely suitable for mixed company.

The term Maggie's Drawers was also used to describe a red flag that was waived by the umpires at a rifle range to signify that the shooter had completely missed the target.

And, lest you think it gauche that Dame Thatcher's dainties should be flogged to the great unwashed public, a rather voluminous pair of Queen Victoria's knickers was sold this past July, fetching a handsome 10,500 quid.

Maggie en route to give unruly colliery workers a damned smart lesson.

The Price We Pay. Putin's Second Front.

That's what can happen when you pull your tank up to someone else's doorstep. It's a reference to NATO's relentless march to the very borders of Russia. Think Georgia, think Ukraine, think the Baltics. Think Canadian warships patrolling off Crimea. Think American stealth warplanes deployed within striking distance of Moscow.

Now think of the Arctic, an area we'd truly like to see largely demilitarized, only this time think of it as though you were Vlad Putin.  It's where he gets to station his bombers, his warships and his long-range cruise missiles on the polar equivalent of our doorstep.

Maintaining any significant military force in the polar region isn't easy. That's why Russia has already developed a floating nuclear power plant, a reactor on a huge barge, and within five years plans to deploy smaller, air transportable, nuclear reactors on tracked chassis that can power entire military bases.

Not surprisingly, Justin Trudeau is being lobbied by Canadian defence experts to sign on to America's ballistic missile defence programme and get NATO more committed to Arctic defence.

Face it. The post-Cold War era of peace is pretty much over. We saw to that when we marched NATO to Russia's borders. As the current head of the International Crisis Group, Jean-Marie Guehenno, puts it, "the threat of big war is back."

Good luck, Justin. Tough decisions lie ahead.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



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

How's This For a Script? Warning - It's a Tough Read.

Young men and women, conscripts, manning the ramparts at Festung (fortress) Europa as legions of desperate migrants approach seeking safety. As the steely commander shouts the order the young defenders reluctantly open fire on the horde knowing they have no other choice - the migrants carry among them a highly infectious strain of cholera.

Sounds like utter dystopia, doesn't it? Well, relax, there is no Festung Europa yet and no infectious horde is marching on Europe yet, but... an outbreak of cholera is now sweeping Iran and experts warn that the impacts of war, climate change and this year's powerful El Nino, create ideal conditions for it and other infectious diseases associated with extreme, mass suffering to spread rapidly and far. From Foreign Policy:

Although the scope of the current outbreak is moderate so far, with fewer than 11,000 illnesses confirmed, it has already spread across an expanse far larger than the 1997 epidemic, taken a greater toll in the Middle East, and still threatens to travel with refugee populations to a even wider geographic area. Moreover, there is ample reason to believe the official tally is grossly undercounted.

At least 2,000 people in Iraq have contracted cholera since mid-September, and Vibriobacteria have contaminated the Euphrates River, possibly the Tigris, as well. The epidemic is thriving amid a perfect storm of failed-state capacity in Baghdad, even worse “state” failures in Anbar province and other regions controlled by the self-declared Islamic State, encampments of millions of Syrian refugees and other homeless displaced people, and harsh downpours slamming parts of Africa and the Middle East thanks to one of the worstPacific El Niño climate events in recorded history.

On Oct. 26, the Syrian American Medical Society, a nongovernmental organization providing aid inside the war-torn country, said it was “very likely” a child living outside of Aleppo died from cholera, possibly due to a widespread contagion in the area. Since January, UNICEF has reported more than 105,000 cases of acute diarrheal disease in Syrian children inside the country, though no laboratories there are available to determine the infectious cause of most of the illnesses. Some, perhaps many, could be due to cholera.

And there’s reason to fear the epidemic could spread further afield, too. Turkish officials have assured their people that no cases of cholera have been confirmed among Syrian refugees living in that country. In Lebanon, where millions of refugees reside and government chaos is responsible for a nearly four-month cessation of garbage collection,doctors warn that conditions are ripe for an explosive spread of the disease. On Oct. 2,Greek health officials placed a Dutch tourist in treatment in Athens after the individual developed acute diarrhea on the island of Kos, a landing point for thousands of Syrian refugees. Although cholera was feared, it was never confirmed. Nevertheless, there isgrowing concern in Europe that with the refugees will come the Vibrio cholerae.

But this year’s cholera crisis already goes far beyond the borders of Iraq or even the lengths of the Euphrates and Tigris Rivers.

...Cholera bacteria can travel from one place to another via two ways: through water systems or through infected people. When contaminated human waste is dumped into a river, cholera is carried downstream. Food that is irrigated with contaminated water, and then shipped to another region or country, may carry the disease to new areas if the produce is eaten raw and unwashed. In 1979, I was in a cholera epidemic in Tanzania that spread far and wide on cashew nuts that were packaged by the unwashed hands of people who were infected. International travelers may unknowingly carry cholera and pass it with their waste, spreading Vibrio bacteria from one country to another.

The El-Nino Conveyor.

Climate and weather play a key role. In the 1997-1998 epidemic, the disease’s spread was hastened by torrential downpours and mudslides from a periodic climate swing that occurs when transpacific winds change, for reasons unknown, pushing ocean currents out of their normal patterns. This weather pattern is called El Niño.

...By mid-October, the El Niño drama was clearly unfolding. The weather system was blamed for holding toxic air in a stagnant dome over Singapore, sending killer typhoons across the Philippines and Southeast Asia, causing a drought in usually drenched parts of West Africa, and showering parts of East Africa with sporadic rains of such force that mudslides and floods resulted. Changes in the hunting patterns of King Penguins have been blamed on El Niño, along with an overall East African drought so dire that the United Nations warns thatsevere food insecurity may loom. And on Oct. 25, an atmospheric scientist from Colorado State University credited El Niño with feeding Hurricane Patricia, which had record-breaking winds as high as 200 miles per hour.

El Niño’s impact on the Middle East, coupled with climate change, has been two-fold: First, temperatures from southern Iraq all the way into Turkey reached record highs this summer, topping more than 122 degrees Fahrenheit. The entire region is now locked in a severe drought, worse than the one some have credited with spawning the Syrian uprisings of 2011 that led to the Assad regime’s crackdown and current civil war.

Climate change, meanwhile, has hit the South Asia/Middle East region with severe drought causing some major rivers such as the Tigris and Euphrates to be dammed by the countries they pass through. This slows or halts the flow of the rivers increasing the growth of cholera bacteria. Getting ISIS to open the Ramadi dam they control will not be easy. Meanwhile the river water and produce grown with that water become increasingly dangerous.

The Good News

So far the cholera that has spread from the Middle East into Africa is just one strain, Inaba, that is relatively easily treated and for which an effective and inexpensive vaccine is available but there are inadequate stocks of it. The World Health Organization (WHO) has a million doses but it intends to use half of that to vaccinate 250,000 displaced people in government-controlled regions of Iraq.

The Future

More than 10 million Iraqis, Syrians, and Kurds are now living in squalor, displaced within their own countries or in refugee settlements in the region. Among refugees over the last four years have been outbreaks of measles (1,000 cases currently inside Iraq), typhoid fever, hepatitis A, Crimean-Congo hemorrhagic fever, and even polio, which was once all but eradicated from the Middle East. Conditions are ripe for a cholera epidemic that might take hold for a very long time.

Epidemiologists have been warning us for years that mass-migrations of the sort foreseen for much of this century will trigger and spread highly lethal epidemics. We live in a world in which more than one in three has no access to basic sanitation. In the Third World more people have cell phones than the number with toilets. Putting these people to flight from any cause - war, famine, water shortages, sea level rise, whatever - magnifies the risk of rapidly spreading, lethal epidemics.

This cholera epidemic is the world's wake-up call. Will we even hear it?

It is  

The 20/20 Project - Warnings Worth Heeding

The International Crisis Group, a prestigious think tank devoted to conflict resolution and avoidance formerly headed by Canadian Louise Arbour, is celebrating its 20th anniversary by unveiling the 20/20 Project. This is a series of 20 essays by some magnificent minds to be released over the course of the year.

As a teaser, here are some excerpts from two of the first tranche of essays, "Failures of Democracy," by Lord Christopher Patten, Chancellor of the University of Oxford; and "The World's Fragmenting Conflicts," by Crisis Group president, Jean-Marie Guehenno.

On our faltering democracy, Lord Patten observes:

The Great Wars’ victors created a better world with remarkable generosity and virtuosity on Washington’s part. The UN, the European Union, the World Trade Organisation and the World Bank, together with the steady spread of democracy and the rule of law, promised and provided for a better world for millions.

So what happened? When and how did things change? When did the world seem to swing off its previous course and turn onto a new path in a different direction leading to who knows where?

Since then the old certainties have crumbled away into confusion and doubt. China’s economic rise seems to have faltered with the prospect, Larry Summers thinks, of a sharp growth regression to the much lower mean of other previously fast-growing economies. The U.S. retains its prominence as the world’s only real super-power, but seems to have lost its international self-confidence and its enthusiasm for global leadership somewhere in the thankless deserts of Mesopotamia and the committee rooms on Capitol Hill.

To some, Europe looks as decadent as a Sorrentino movie; at best it drifts between past dreams and tough contemporary choices — flashy and introverted or competitive and outward-looking. Failing states from Central and Western Asia to the Sahel export their problems and people. The bleak prospects for the world’s poorest, the bottom billion, threaten to turn much of the world into a Darwinian battlefield.

One potentially bright spot on the horizon is the prospect this year of a global deal on climate change — too late and arguably too little, but at least something to build on for the future. It is a reminder, as well, that the problems that assail us can only be tackled effectively by international co-operation. Perhaps people really are aware that our future depends on such a sense of common interest and common humanity, and yet they and their leaders do not behave as though they are.

...In the mid-years of the last century, the old democracies took the lead in making cooperation work and creating institutions that could channel and manage that common endeavour. Rhetoric on the whole ran ahead of reality. It usually does. But the UN and its family had real success despite the early years of brutish Russian behaviour and the long-term ambivalence of the great powers about ceding authority to a quasi-global government. Yet today, along with the authority of other regional organisations like the European Union, the credibility and legitimacy of sovereignty-sharing as a means of overcoming that bypass or demolish national frontiers is discredited or ignored.

...In the U.S. and Europe — which bear a particular responsibility for the effectiveness of all these global institutions — politicians run scared of challenging voters with the brute realities of the 21st century. Is speaking the truth to your nation’s citizens a certain way to lose office? Perhaps, but surely not forever. Moreover, if someone doesn’t try, political leaders will in any event lose their posts and much more besides. It is not enough for elected presidents and prime ministers, like Abbé Sieyès during the French Revolution and its aftermath, to regard mere survival as a triumph.

Can the excessively partisan, money-dominated American political system rediscover its vitality as an exemplar of democracy? Can European politics recover their morale, with Europe’s leaders telling their citizens more than these voters may find comfortable to hear? There seems to me to be a host of existential questions about the way the oldest democracies run their affairs. Perhaps even without a real democratic exertion, even without putting our faith again in reason and in the willingness of voters to behave rationally, we can somehow muddle through the next few years. The danger is that muddle is no longer sufficient. The danger is that we can’t and won’t muddle through. The danger is that we are at a real tipping-point on what Matthew Arnold described as “this darkling plain”. The danger is that this time things will tip.

On 21st century conflicts, Guehenno writes:

There was for a while a significant decline in conflict, as the world got better at peacemaking and peacekeeping.

But here we are, with a war in Syria that has claimed a quarter million deaths and displaced some twelve million people from their homes; with the return of power politics and great power rivalry playing out in Ukraine, as well as in Syria, and, in different form, the South China Sea; and with a new transnational jihadist agenda that infects an increasing number of conflicts that were, at their inception, simpler local disputes.

The threat of big war is back, and new forms of violence — cyber-attacks, hybrid war, and terrorism with a global reach — are redefining conflict.

They threaten to reverse the progress achieved since the end of the Cold War and challenge the legal order that emerged from World War II. At issue is not just that violent non-state actors threaten an international order based on the sovereignty of states. The problem is also that states themselves increasingly use force in situations that stretch or violate the UN founding principle that prohibits the use force except in cases of self-defence, or when the UN Security Council has authorised action in the interests of international peace and security.

...It is not enough to say that there are more intra- than inter-state conflicts. In a world that is as much multi-layered as it is multipolar, conflict is also multilayered: most conflicts still have very local roots, but they are often manipulated by external powers or hijacked by transnational ideologies.

The world is no more the top-down strategic play that it often was during the Cold War, but it would be naïve to think that a purely bottom-up analysis can explain the complexities of recent conflicts. Ukraine is about Ukraine, and it is also about Russia, and about Russia and the West. Syria is about the Assad regime, but it is also about the rivalry between Iran, Turkey and Saudi Arabia, and about the spread of transnational jihadism.

States are losing their centrality as the theatre within which politics is played, and they compete with other actors, benevolent or malevolent, whose goals may not be confined within the borders of a particular country.

...let’s admit that when confronted with conflict and change, there is no such thing as an “international community”.

There never was, but there was the pretense, and that pretense was useful. Exposing hypocrisy can be the beginning of virtue, and the world’s thugs could sometimes be shamed into not blatantly challenging a working, if shallow, international consensus. This is no longer the case: established and emerging norms, as well as values that were still considered universal a decade ago, are now openly attacked as the props of an unfair order imposed by Western powers.

Indeed, a strong case can be made that Western powers have a significant share of responsibility for the unraveling of the international order: they launched a military operation in Iraq without the explicit authorisation of the UN Security Council, and they used the doctrine of Responsibility to Protect as cover for a policy of regime change in Libya. Both actions have had a disastrous aftermath.

Western powers lost moral authority as they were accused of double standards.

Guehenno's arguments make the case that we live in a world bereft of vision and statesmanship, the helmsmen of international comity. We go to distant corners of the world indulging in "whack-a-mole" warfare that earns us nothing but enmity from those we attack and, often, those we pretend to be helping alike.

As the year goes on and more essays are released I'll try to link to them.

Now that Harper's Gone, the University of Calgary Comes In for Scrutiny

Over the past decade the University of Calgary became a regular source of rightwing advocacy. At times it seemed like Canada's answer to the University of Chicago. There were a number of world-class, courageous academics but, during Harper's reign, the university also became a favoured bastion of the energy giants, especially Enbridge, and shady characters such as repeat jailbird/Harper confidante Bruce Carson.

Eventually the stench of bitumen-laundering overwhelmed the hallowed halls of foothills academia, sending some of UC's best and brightest fleeing in pursuit of academic integrity south of the border.

Two of these top-drawer academics have come out to expose what sent them packing. In September, David Keith, now professor of public policy at Harvard, wrote a piece in the Toronto Star chronicling how Bruce Carson and his Ottawa funded Canada School for Energy and Environment were welcomed into the university.

"It soon became clear that Carson was simply using his academic post to further the interests of the conservative government and a narrow segment of the energy industry. Documents released by the RCMP contain emails and interviews making it unequivocally clear that Carson worked closely with industry leaders to produce meetings and reports that had the patina of stakeholder representation, while in fact aiming to avoid meaningful public debate.

"Leaders of Alberta’s universities did nothing substantive to manage the problem until Carson’s scandal forced their hands. Even then, they failed to act decisively to ensure that public money was used for research that supported broad public interests."

CBC News has a report today of another leading academic, Joe Arvai, and what drove him to leave the University of Calgary. Professor Arvai's sage revolves around pipeline giant, Enbridge, and the Enbridge Center for Corporate Sustainability.

The story of the Enbridge Centre for Corporate Sustainability covers a short and troubled two-and-a-half years that ended in the fall of 2014.

In that time, documents obtained by the CBC reveal a university bending over backward to accommodate the apparent public relations ambitions of a corporate patron.

Along the way, concerns about academic independence, the role of university research and the credibility of the researchers were dismissed.
...Faculty members, such as business professor Harrie Vredenburg, described Enbridge's influence at the university as a classic case of "he who pays the piper calls the tunes" in an email complaint to Waverman on Aug. 26, 2011.

...The pairing, though, was fraught from the start, and one of those who felt that way was Joe Arvai, the young academic – a rising star in the area of organizational decision-making – who had been brought in to head the new venture.

...From the outset, though, Enbridge's hands-on approach to the new centre troubled Arvai, according to the email trail.

Beyond naming rights, Enbridge sought to influence board memberships, staffing and the type of students that would be considered for awards, the emails show.

...In a Jan. 3, 2012 email to Leonard Waverman, the dean of the Haskayne School of Business at the time, Arvai wrote: "I am not sure what we are signing up for. I have the impression that Enbridge sees the centre as a PR machine for themselves, whereas I see it as an academic research centre.

"In the latter case, it's likely that finds of academic work in the centre will not, at times, paint industry — including Enbridge — in the best light. I'm not sure that Enbridge understands this."

The dean responded that he did not understand Arvai's concerns.

At one point the dean told Arvai in a voicemail message, "If this goes belly up my ass is on the line and I won't feel happy with you either on this."

...Increased corporate sponsorship, however, also means that appropriate protocols must be in place to protect researchers and the public interest.

When it comes to the Enbridge Centre, questions remain about whether the university's administration — and U of C president Elizabeth Cannon, in particular — did enough to safeguard these concerns.

Emails show that Cannon was aware of the problems at the Enbridge centre before and after its launch in 2012.

But her emails at the time show she was intent on keeping Enbridge happy, especially considering the company had in the past given more money to the University of Alberta in Edmonton.

...When it comes to Enbridge, Cannon also has her own potential conflict of interest by virtue of her being an independent director of Enbridge Income Fund Holdings, since late 2010. She has disclosed this position. Last year, her board compensation from that position amounted to $130,500.

When it comes to academic independence a university ought to be like Caesar's wife - above reproach. The departures of David Keith and Joe Arvai plus all the records and documents the university had to disclose at the very least call the University of Calgary's integrity into question.

In so many ways this seems emblematic of the culture of the Decade of Harper.,

What Do Rupert Murdoch and Mick Jagger Have in Common?

Okay, it's time for a bit of unrepentant fluff.

Rupert Murdoch and Mick Jagger have one thing in common - Jerry Hall.

Jagger's former companion of 23-years and mother to some of his children is now Reptilian Rupert's companion.

Here, see for yourself:

Now They Notice? Too Little, Far Too Late. Give Them the Sack.

Almost from the day he ascended to power, Stephen Harper has held the public service, and most other government institutions, in a choke hold. Harper, the Great Corrupter, transformed government institutions into his personal, partisan political agencies.

Everything was skewed from the National Energy Board to the federal Competition Bureau (see the previous post on the looming collapse of Canada's newspaper chains).

Now we get word that in May, almost a decade on, top bureaucrats met to discuss "creeping politicization" of the public service.

As a new Liberal government takes the reins this week, Canada's top bureaucrats are looking for ways to purge partisan politics from the shell-shocked public service.

The highest echelon of the bureaucracy met in the spring, before the election was called, to discuss ways to insulate public servants from intense pressure to be "promiscuously partisan" instead of neutral in carrying out the government's agenda.

Ralph Heintzman, a research professor at the University of Ottawa, has cited the example of a communications directive requiring bureaucrats to refer to the "Harper government" in news releases, rather than the government of Canada.

Other examples include a request last year that departments send retweets promoting a family-tax measure not yet passed by Parliament, including a hashtag with the Conservative slogan #StrongFamilies, and public servants working overtime to create promotional videos about child benefits, spots that prominently featured Pierre Poilievre, the employment minister.

"For anyone who cares about the condition of our federal public service, this is a very depressing story," Heintzman wrote about the "Strong Families" tweets last April, a month before the deputy ministers' meeting.

What's wrong with this story? Just about everything. The mandarins are running for cover. They failed to stand up to Harper. They chose not to defend the public service over which they presided. They allowed themselves to be intimidated into colluding with a corrupt government. They abandoned their responsibility to the nation and the Canadian people and they now, unforgivably and outrageously, depict themselves as victims.

I've had veteran public servants tell me of the Harper culture of intimidation that set in where they became fearful of even telling the truth lest it put their jobs in jeopardy. They saw too many others lose everything for not parroting the party line, not going along to get along while advancement was reserved for sycophants. They knew there was no one above them willing to stand up for them and so they toiled on, hoping not to be noticed. 

These top bureaucrats should be required to submit letters of resignation on the swearing-in of Canada's new prime minister and Trudeau should not be timid about accepting them.

The Guardian's Obituary for PostMedia

Did the shameful performance of Canada's major newspaper chains sound their deathknell? Have they so broken faith with the Canadian people that the days are numbered for would-be media giants such as PostMedia? According to The Guardian, Canada's corporate media cartel may be on its way out.

The most common prediction ahead of last month’s Canadian election was that the country’s many polling firms would again fail to predict the results. In the event, most of them accurately foresaw Justin Trudeau’s Liberals sweeping into power. Instead, it was the country’s daily newspapers that got it wrong, promoting the incumbent Conservatives while readers and voters turned en masse against the party. Social media pounced on the striking disconnect with increasing ferocity as editors in virtually every Canadian city and town published tortured endorsements of Stephen Harper’s government.

Yet the defeat was a particularly brutal blow for Canada’s dominant chain, Postmedia, which publishes more than half of the traditional daily newspapers in English-speaking Canada and all but a handful of those that matter. Postmedia achieved its market dominance in step with the rise of Harper’s Conservatives. Its support for Harper was widely seen as an expression of the company’s will rather than editorial judgment. One columnist at the Postmedia title the Edmonton Journal wrote on Twitter that owners rather than editors had decided which party to back.

The company’s chain-wide blitz supporting Harper culminated a few days before the election when virtually all Postmedia publications replaced their front pages with a pro-Conservative advertisement masquerading as an official notice from Elections Canada, the independent agency managing the vote.

...The company has halved its workforce from 5,400 to 2,500 since it first arose from the bankruptcy of a predecessor chain in 2010, gutting newsrooms in response to falling annual revenue. It has lost money every year since, most recently posting a C$263m loss on revenues of $750m for the year ending August 2015. Despite that, it continues to expand, having recently swallowed up the rival Sun chain of tabloid newspapers to give it a near-monopoly position in the print advertising markets of all but three English-speaking Canadian cities.

Postmedia has been able to expand despite its dire financial condition thanks to a succession of high-interest loans from US financiers led by Golden Tree Asset Management, a hedge fund that specialises in the debt of distressed companies. Paying Golden Tree rates ranging from 8.25% to 12.5% on what is now $650m in debt, Postmedia has sent more than $60m annually in interest payments to New York even as revenues collapse and losses mount.

“I don’t think they care much about the economic viability of these newspapers over the long run,” says Dwayne Winseck, professor of journalism at Ottawa’s Carleton University. “They’re just riding this thing down and milking what they can out of it until the papers disappear, except for maybe a handful. It’s a pretty lousy situation.

...The Harper government did not challenge the foreign takover of Postmedia, despite longstanding tax rules designed to ensure the country’s newspapers remain in Canadian hands. Earlier this year, the federal Competition Bureau approved Postmedia’s acquisition of the Sun papers, saying the new near-monopoly “is unlikely to substantially lessen or prevent competition”. In seeking permission for the takeover, Postmedia assured the regulator that its newspapers would pursue independent editorial policies. Mere months later they were predictably backing Harper’s Conservatives. The company is led by Paul Godfrey, a former Conservative politician and powerbroker from Toronto who has said he expects the chain to be sold to a wealthy businessman more interested in political influence than profits.

However, a decoupling of Postmedia from the political establishment could benefit the wider media ecosystem in Canada. “[The federal government] should stop trying to play handmaiden to owners who have made a hash of the business they’re in,” Winseck says. “These folks have been going on acquisition sprees now since the late 1990s, and they’ve been doing this at precisely the time we need all hands on deck to deal with the rapidly changing media.”

Update:

Overnight I kept coming back to Arthur Miller's observation, the caption of the cartoon atop: "A Good Newspaper is a Nation Talking to Itself." In just nine words I think he might have diagnosed the terminal affliction that has spread through modern newspapers.

Today's newspapers aren't conversations. They're corporate messaging. PostMedia's shameless "partnership" with the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers is an extreme example but illustrative of what goes on regularly albeit in more subtle fashion.

In the Sun chain or the PostMedia pack we aren't talking to ourselves for, after all, we are the nation. The corporate media cartel is not "of us." It is "of them" and it is using, no abusing, its dominance to lecture us, scold us, manipulate us.

The Guardian article reveals just how terribly pernicious has become the partnership between the corporate media and high political office holders, how the corporate media, in a transformation befitting Jeckyll and Hyde, went from the watchdog of government to the government's lap dog, both sides shifting their allegiance from the public to each other for their mutual, symbiotic advantage.

Foreign ownership? No problem, approved. A monopolistic merger of the two largest newspaper chains? No problem. "Don't worry, we'll take care of the federal Competition Bureau, we own it. It does as we say."

We're told that newspapers are dying. If so it's by their own hand. They saw fit to abandon their responsibility as the Fourth Estate to pursue a path of influence peddling. They commodified information, polluting it with messaging directed to benefit or harm particular interests and promote or undermine targeted viewpoints. They commodified it so that thereby they would have a value-added product of merchantable and proprietary value. And with it they sought to corrupt the national conversation.

I am becoming less convinced that the 'day of the newspaper' is over. The day of these newspapers is certainly over and that can only be a good thing.

As Miller so sagely notes, a newspaper is the vehicle of a national conversation and the need for that is, if anything, greater than ever. It's been withheld from us for so long that we've come to see the notion of a Canada without the Sun papers or PostMedia broadsheets as tragic. It's not. It is an essential part of renewal. It is how we go ahead.

Connie Black Flips his Wig

Why does he keep using "us" when he's referencing the Canadian people? He left "us" when he renounced his Canadian citizenship in order to become a British citizen entitled to claim a seat in Britain's House of Lords. By the way, isn't he somehow AWOL, absent without leave, from that elevated post on the other side of the pond? Or does his stretch in an American greybar hotel put his very lordship in jeopardy if he again sets foot in Britain's upper chamber?

Conrad is, however, an enthusiastic pseudo-Canadian and it's from this ersatz perch that he has opined on exactly what Trudeau the younger must do to put Canada once again on an even keel.

Black begins by complimenting Trudeau on achieving a real majority, reminiscent of Mulroney's electoral triumphs, and not the wee majority held by the dastardly Harper for just one term. Having done that, Lord Black of Piddlepuddle turns truly unhinged.

Here are some of the highlights. A modest wealth tax on high net worth people that would not be collected. The government wouldn't get the exigible money but the taxpayer would apply it to innovative means to reduce poverty. What could possibly go wrong with that?

Connie calls for a doubling in size of the Canadian Armed Forces because he read somewhere that bloated military outlays - not frivolous distractions like replacing collapsing infrastructure - are the best form of stimulus spending. And, with a nod to Hugo Boss, Black wants Canada's fashion bright lights to design really neat uniforms for all those soldiers, something that speaks of style, sizzle.

But wait, there's more. The old jailbird wants major change in the way we're governed. No more prime minister. An elected president instead, one who would double as our governor general.  I won't get into his convoluted ideas about Senate reform.

There is one area in which Black does have some expertise - prison reform. Here he wants non-violent offenders (such as himself) to avoid imprisonment altogether but, instead, to "contribute their work and live in freedom in Spartan circumstances" but with provisions for a quickie on the weekends.

The Global South is On the Move.

The amazing part about the migration of refugees out of war-torn Syria is the alarm it seems to be causing to so many Westerners. Here's a tip. Don't ask yourself how this is going to end. The real question is where the next wave of human migration will come from - and the one after that, and the next one, and all the rest.

People in many parts of the world realize that their ancient homelands are no longer livable or won't be much longer. To them it's time to  di di mau, get out of Dodge, head for the high ground. And, to them, that pretty much means the Western World, the Global North. They know that those who wait risk leaving it until too late.

In other words, the pre-migration world is over. This is the new reality.

Lord Paddy Ashdown, former head of Britain's Liberal Democrats, recently warned that the Syrian migration is just a "dress rehearsal." 

As I've written often for several years, both the American and British military have studied the risks of massive migrations and see it as a huge security threat, one that must be met, if necessary, by force.  Meanwhile an article today in the Sydney Morning Herald warns that the Global South is indeed "on the move."

Egypt's 5 million or more Copts, the Middle East's last remaining major Christian sect, are deeply worried about their future in an unstable and hostile country. Ancient minority groups like the Yazidis of Iraq are already homeless, as are many small communities of Assyrian, Nestorian and Chaldean Christians from northern Iraq.

Nor is it only the Middle East and North Africa that European leaders need to consider. The Gallup Poll, based on data compiled from more than 450,000 interviews in 151 nations from 2009 to 2011, found that in Nigeria, which already has double the population of Germany, 40 per cent of people would emigrate to the West if they could. And the lesson of 2015 – for them and much of the world – is that they can.

While the flow of migrants to Europe this year already represents the biggest influx from outside the Continent in modern history, many experts warn that the mass movement may continue and even increase – possibly for years to come. "We are talking about millions of potential refugees trying to reach Europe, not thousands," Donald Tusk, the president of the European Council, said in a recent Twitter posting.

While most of the migrants have been from Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan, those who came through villages like this last summer could have arrived from almost anywhere.

Two women from Haiti and a young girl, the daughter of one of them, passed through in early October, according to officials here representing the UN High Commissioner for Refugees. They had flown to Turkey from Haiti, then joined smugglers' routes through the Balkans.

"I don't think this wave can stop," said Sonja Licht of the International Centre for Democratic Transition. "It can maybe from time to time be somewhat less intensive; we simply have to prepare. The global north must be prepared that the global south is on the move, the entire global south. This is not just a problem for Europe but for the whole world."

 

Voices from the Past - Busting the Corporate Media Cartel

It startled me when Owen at Northern Reflections posted an item yesterday on a Murray Dobbin op-ed calling for the restoration of a free press as the first step in rehabilitating Canada's ailing democracy.

Busting up the corporate media cartel (CMC) wasn't an issue in the last election. Only one party called for it in their platform and it wasn't the Liberals or the NDP and certainly not the Tories either. It was my party, the Greens.

This blog has been around for nearly ten years and for almost as long I've been championing the need to reform Canada's mass media as the cornerstone to restoring liberal democracy to our country.

One of the features common to both liberal and illiberal democracy is that they both allow voting. Where they differ is that in just one, liberal democracy, the will of the electorate matters while in the other it often doesn't. How can that be? It's as simple as it is deviously subtle. Part of it is voter manipulation. One way to control voters is to manage the information they receive. A misinformed public is a manipulated public. Sure they vote but the political power of their votes, the clout, transfers to the agent that steers them, not the voters. Those who can manufacture consent can have nearly anything they wish.

I grew up with these theories. The Davey Commission (1970) was held just a few years before I became a budding Ottawa journo. It was followed by the Kent Commission in 1981 just as I began my legal career in Vancouver. A nicely digested summary of these reports is available here.

These commissions looked at the threats to democracy posed by concentration of ownership (one chain obtaining an unhealthy dominance by owning too many newspapers) and media cross-ownership (whereby corporations gained dominance in individual markets by acquiring newspaper, TV and radio outlets).

I'll paraphrase the theory behind these inquiries. True democracy depends on a truly free press that furnishes the public generous access to information and opinion from the greatest number of voices spanning the broadest political spectrum from far right to far left and everything in between. This required that media ownership be as diversified, broadly owned, as possible. This was critical to preventing the media from becoming the lapdog of government (as today) instead of the watchdog of government.

To people like the Aspers and the Blacks and the denizens of the PostMedia and Sun chain, this thinking is as the noonday sun to a vampire.

Concentration of ownership gives rise to a democratically corrosive symbiosis between the few hands that control the media and the government of the day. Each has an interest in the health and welfare of the other. Through this the fealty of the media shifts from the public to those who govern the public. In return, government pretty much allows the media barons to have their way with us.

We never saw this more clearly than in the solidarity between Canada's major newspapers and the Harper government in the pre-election editorials this time around. The media took Harper's side, not ours. Their support of Harper was unanimous and anyone who sought to say differently, even Andrew Coyne, was gagged. That wasn't a fluke. It was merely a powerfully obvious display of what's been going on in Canada's CMC for years.

When just three or four or five hands direct Canada's mainstream media, all you can reliably expect to hear is the one voice that reflects their narrow, common interest. Newsrooms are gutted. Information is streamlined. The lines between news, opinion, and commercial messaging are blurred and eventually fade. News is no longer news but something that can be quite inimical to liberal democracy.

Now the good news. We don't have to re-invent the wheel. Davey and Kent have already done the heavy lifting. They've thought this through. We just need to dust off their wisdom and shape it to Canada almost half a century later.

Brace yourself. This, to your now thoroughly conditioned mind, could sound pretty radical.

Here are the recommendations on ownership and divestment:

In the area of ownership and divestment, the Commission proposed legislation to:

• prohibit the expansion of existing chains owning or controlling five or more daily newspapers;
• prohibit any future chain from acquiring more than five papers;
• prevent a conglomerate from purchasing a daily newspaper by prohibiting purchases where the value of the purchaser’s non-newspaper assets exceeded the value of the newspaper;
• prohibit ownership of newspapers and radio or television stations where 50% or more of the radio/television market was within the paper’s market;
• require the break-up of regional monopolies, such as that of the Irving family in New Brunswick, by prohibiting the ownership of two or more newspapers having 75% or more of the circulation, in one language, in a defined geographical area;
• prohibit ownership of both a daily newspaper published in more than one province and any other daily newspaper (thus requiring Thomson to sell either the Globe and Mail or all of its other newspapers);
• allow a minimum of five and a maximum of ten years from proclamation of the legislation for divestiture of newspapers whose ownership became illegal on proclamation;
• create an administrative agency (the Press Rights Panel) which would apply the ownership and divestiture rules and have the power, in certain areas, to permit exceptions to them;
• allow a minimum of five and a maximum of seven years for any subsequent divesting order made by the Press Right Panel;
• require any paper intending to close down to publish notice of that intention and thereafter not to close down until after the expiration of a defined period;
• prohibit the sale of assets of any paper intending to close operation until the ownership had satisfied the Press Rights Panel that there was no economically viable offer that would allow the paper to continue as a going concern.

Here are the recommendations on Editorial Independence. Brace yourselves:

The Commission proposed that all daily papers other than those qualifying as "individual" papers should employ their managing editors under a written contract guaranteeing their editorial independence from the newspaper publisher.(3) This contract would give the managing editor (acting within the budget set by the owner) full responsibility for:

• editorial policy within the parameters of the newspaper’s principles and objectives as set out in the contract;
• editorial expenses;
• the content of the newspaper (excluding advertising); and
• labour relations, including the hiring and firing of employees.

The proposed contract would also have given the managing editor the right to comment adversely on the activities of the owners and any associates, and prohibited the proprietor from attempting to override the managing editor’s judgement as to what could be published.

Can you imagine living in a Canada where the media operated under these rules, provisions that didn't harness their voice but actually freed it?

One powerful reason why I couldn't vote Liberal or NDP was because they were both content with the status quo on our CMC. As I have argued so often, busting the Corporate Media Cartel is where the process of democratic reform must begin. Voting reform is important, no question, but what is it without an informed electorate? Not very much.