Washington Post - Could the Green Party Spell Trouble for Justin Trudeau in October?

Justin Trudeau must be so pleased that he reneged on his promise to rid Canada of first-past-the-post elections and the consequent false majorities it has inflicted on the Canadian people. That broken promise, among the litany of his broken promises and outright lies, may be the one that matters most when we go to the polls this October.

Despite that, the Washington Post asks if the Green Party of Canada could be bad news for Trudeau in the looming election.

With the federal election expected to begin in the late summer or fall, Canada’s political parties are preparing to battle for as many of the country’s 338 ridings as they can — and prognosticators are warming up, too. Will the Liberals hold on to government? Will they retain their majority? Which issues are going to dominate the campaign? 

For months, the Liberals and Conservatives have been in a fairly close one-two race — with the latter picking up steam. Most polls have the former in front. Commentators and pundits, me included, have been saying that the smart money is on Prime Minister Justin Trudeau hanging on to government, perhaps with a reduced majority. He remains popular — or popular-ish, depending on which polls you read. 

The economy is doing well on aggregate. A start-up party led by disgruntled former Conservative member of Parliament (and former cabinet minister) Maxime Bernier is set to drain support from his old crew. And the New Democratic Party (NDP), with whom the Liberals compete for left and center-left votes, are currently weak. 

But in politics, as in life, there are threats you know about and threats you don’t. And then there are wild cards. Enter the Green Party of Canada. Led by Elizabeth May — one of the hardest-working parliamentarians in the country, a deeply informed and fierce debater, and a long-term champion for doing what it takes to address climate change — the party, for years, has had one seat in the House of Commons. That tracks with the Greens’ success around the country — not much of it. Until recently. 

In the 2017 British Columbia election, the local Green Party went from one seat to three in the provincial parliament, about doubling its popular support from 8 percent to nearly 17 percent. It ran the idealist campaign: saying no to money from unions and corporations, distancing itself from the old punch-counter-punch of the Liberals and the NDP, doubling down on a clean environment platform and the need for, you know, a habitable planet. In 2018, in Ontario, Mike Schreiner made history as the first Green elected to the legislature in that province. In New Brunswick, after a wacky election, the Greens are benefiting from growing public support, drawing from the Liberals. 

And in Prince Edward Island, some are suggesting the Greens could make history by winning the election and forming government — a year out from the race, they are effectively tied for first place. Recently in Maclean’s, Jason Markusoff profiled the party, asking, “Where in Canada will the Greens win next?” 

The Greens are clearly a growing force. 

Federally, in November, Green Party leader May was polling at 11 percent as preferred prime minister — tied with the NDP leader Jagmeet Singh. Now her party is hovering around 7 percent on the aggregate polling numbers. That’s good news for them and potentially bad news for Trudeau. As David Coletto, CEO of Abacus Data, put it on Twitter: “Many, including me, say a weak NDP helps the [Liberals] in 2019. But if the Greens pull 8-10% of the vote, that’s tough for the [Liberals].” 

I think he’s right. He concludes, “I’m starting to think that @JustinTrudeau’s greater threat is @ElizabethMay, not @theJagmeetSingh.” Agreed, again, although I’d add that the combination of the two is a particularly serious challenge for Trudeau, especially if either — or both — parties perform well in some of the 34 ridings the Liberals carried by 5 percent or less in 2015 (out of 70 such nail-biter contests in total). 

The Liberals may not be past their best-by date yet — Canadians typically grow tired of federal governments after a few rounds — but they’ve been in government long enough that running the smiling 2015 “Hope and hard work” campaign will be tricky. They’re no longer the scrappy underdog on a quest to unseat the embattled, mean Conservative prime minister. They’re now the ones who broke a promise on electoral reform. They’re the ones who have struggled to build a pipeline — they had to buy the project from the private sector for it to even have a chance — that opponents claim is inconsistent with the government’s environmental agenda. They’re the ones pushing a (morally right and necessary) carbon tax backstop against the will of several (morally wrong and intransigent) provinces. They’re also the target of routine, increasingly nasty attacks from the Conservatives. And now they’re facing a growing scandal over alleged involvement by the prime minister’s office in an attempt to protect the Montreal firm SNC-Lavalin from prosecution over its alleged business practices in Moammar Gaddafi’s Libya. 

The Greens, on the other hand, are rising across the country. Modestly, sure. But notably. They don’t come with baggage. They can run the optimist, hopeful-crusader campaign underwritten by credibility as guardians of the sacred environmental trust — as the environment, day by day, is becoming a more salient issue for voters. Plus, May (as I said, a strong debater) is set to take part in the leaders’ debates in 2019 thanks to rule changes. She’ll be a force onstage. All of that is good news for the Greens and bad news for the other parties. It’s also good news for voters who want and deserve a range of credible options on the ballot.

Obstruction of Justice? Of Course, Yawn.

Up here in the Great White North, we're dampening our dainties over whether the prime minister strong armed a former justice minister to intercede on behalf of a Quebec company with a rich history of corruption at home and abroad. When Canadians get into navel gazing we sometimes lose sight of what's happening elsewhere. For example, the United States.

A gaggle of New York Times reporters, i.e. Haberman et al, have an eye-opening report on how Trump has tried to undermine the New York Southern District prosecutors on the "hush money" scandal.

As federal prosecutors in Manhattan gathered evidence late last year about President Trump’s role in silencing women with hush payments during the 2016 campaign, Mr. Trump called Matthew G. Whitaker, his newly installed attorney general, with a question. He asked whether Geoffrey S. Berman, the United States attorney for the Southern District of New York and a Trump ally, could be put in charge of the widening investigation, according to several American officials with direct knowledge of the call.

Mr. Whitaker, who had privately told associates that part of his role at the Justice Department was to “jump on a grenade” for the president, knew he could not put Mr. Berman in charge, since Mr. Berman had already recused himself from the investigation. The president soon soured on Mr. Whitaker, as he often does with his aides, and complained about his inability to pull levers at the Justice Department that could make the president’s many legal problems go away.

...An examination by The New York Times reveals the extent of an even more sustained, more secretive assault by Mr. Trump on the machinery of federal law enforcement. Interviews with dozens of current and former government officials and others close to Mr. Trump, as well as a review of confidential White House documents, reveal numerous unreported episodes in a two-year drama.

It's a long article but well worth the read if only to refresh one's appreciation for the depth of Trump's corruption. We can only hope that Robert Mueller and other federal prosecutors are just sitting on a stack of soon-to-be unsealed indictments.

The Rapid Decline of Governance - Part Deux

Is 2019 the year the Transatlantic Relationship irreparably fractured? Have Europe and the United States finally taken their leave of each other? Has the United States forfeited its right to proclaim itself leader of the free world? Have mutual rancour and distrust displaced what remained of the bonds between the EU and the US?

In a word, "yes."

According to Brookings fellow, Thomas Wright, the "Transatlantic Charade" ended at the Munich Security Conference.

Europe and the Trump administration have stopped pretending to respect each other. For the past two years, we have been treated to a transatlantic charade. Everyone knows there’s a problem, but publicly the leaders proclaim that nothing has fundamentally changed. But at the 2019 Munich Security Conference, which took place over the weekend, the charade ended. The American position is collapsing under the weight of its own contradictions. The Europeans are defaulting to nostalgia for a multilateral order. Meanwhile, the true challenge of a rising authoritarian bloc goes largely ignored.

The mood of defiance was summed up by Wolfgang Ischinger, the chairman of the Munich Security Conference, in his opening and closing remarks. Ischinger, who is 72, opened the forum’s proceedings sporting a hoodie emblazoned with the EU flag—a gift from his grandson, and a not-too-subtle rebuke to an American administration that has reversed a 70-year policy of support for Europe. Three days later, in a suit and tie, he offered his closing observation: “As this conference concludes, critics might argue that some speakers were less interested in putting the pieces back together than in creating more disarray in our international system.”

The "some speakers" Ischinger referenced were Trump Veep, Mike Pence, and secretary of state Pompeo.

In 2017, Pence spoke at length about the importance of the NATO alliance and its historic accomplishments. In 2019, there was none of that. The only praise of NATO was for its response to Trump’s leadership on defense spending. Otherwise, Pence offered a litany of criticism leveled against NATO and the EU—for not doing enough on Iran, Nord Stream 2, or Venezuela. (Ironically, the EU would have had a common position on this last item were it not for the effective veto of the pro-Trump Italian government.) 

Pence could have come and spoken about the common challenge facing the alliance from China—which is what many Europeans and Americans expected him to do.  ...He did not choose that path, possibly fearing that it would be shot down by a president who has repeatedly rejected the idea of working with the EU on China. 

The administration’s America First approach to Europe is now riven with contradictions. Take Iran as an example. Senior administration officials have repeatedly said over the past year that while the United States was pulling out of the JCPOA, the Iran nuclear deal, they were not calling on the EU to do the same. That, they said, was a matter for Europeans, as sovereign nations, to decide. Apparently sovereignty is not what it used to be. With no explanation for the U-turn, Pence demanded that the EU now withdraw from the JCPOA. His message was clear: Under Trump, the alliance means getting behind whatever Washington decides, even if that changes weekly. 

...The European position is understandable, but fraught with risk. Help, if it comes, will not arrive until 2021. Rumors are rife in Washington of a new Trump move against the NATO alliance, which is preparing for a major meeting in Washington in April.

...But despite all the problems of policy and personnel, the alliance cannot afford to wait two years. The Trump administration may believe that it does not need Europe, and the Europeans may believe that America is temporarily lost, but meanwhile, China and Russia gain ground. In Munich, Yang Jiechi, a senior Chinese official, gave a long and meandering speech about win-win solutions and the benefits of multilateralism, which was completely at odds with China’s increasingly assertive and disruptive behavior. Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif reveled in the disarray between the allies and sought to drive a wedge between them, weaponizing the Trump administration’s rhetoric about sovereignty. 

Wolfgang Ischinger was right. There is a big problem. Western leaders are retreating into their foxholes, taking potshots at one another, rather than figuring out how to deal with new challenges. We’ve been lucky so far that there has not been a major crisis on Trump’s watch, but the luck is unlikely to hold forever.

Then there's the formerly United Kingdom where both the Conservative and Labour parties are adrift, in disarray and chaos ensues with a hard Brexit now less than forty days off. Guardian diplomatic editor, Patrick Wintour, writes that, even at the United Nations, British influence is in palpable decline.

Brexit is already leading to a “palpable decline” in British influence at the UN, and that influence would be in freefall but for the UK’s commitment to spend 0.7 % of gross national income on overseas aid, a study has found. 

The report by the UK branch of the United Nations Association suggests Britain will lose political capital on the 15-member UN security council and the larger general assembly in New York because its campaigns will no longer be automatically aligned with those of the EU.

One by one, the grand old stalwarts are descending into chaos, the United States, the European Union and the no-longer-Great Britain. No one, it seems, has any remedy for this affliction. In most cases the decline in governance is mirrored by an equally worrisome fracturing of social cohesion.

It is not unfair to say that Donald Trump has played an outsized role in this disunity. Much of it emanates from his damaged psyche and his malignant narcissism. That is the most likely outcome when the most powerful man on the planet is mentally unwell.  Then again, destabilizing the West is exactly what Trump's Kremlin idol, Vlad Putin, craves most.

Jody? Jody Who? Oh, Her. Why I Couldn't Care Less About Jody or Gerry or Justin.

Some people seem to have a wonderfully newfound fondness for ex-Justice Minister Jody Wilson-Raybould. I get the part about how she's First Nations and the first FN to serve as A.G. That's pretty much were it ends for me.

The Jody I saw was, should I say, "flexible" when it came to her principles. Think back to the summer of 2016 when, as Attorney General, Jody pushed through federal approval of the Site C dam without First Nations consultation and despite their opposition. Well, she really didn't need to consult with First Nations leaders about the dam. She knew what they believed.

Here's Jody in 2012 as Assembly of First Nations regional chief for B.C. condemning the Site C dam.



That's some flexibility.

Then came the assisted dying controversy, settled by the per curiam, 9-0 decision of the Supreme Court of Canada in the Carter case.  Jody, of course, is a lawyer and a former Crown Attorney. She knows the law. She knows the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. As A.G., independent of her prime minister and cabinet, she knows it is her duty to uphold the law of the land, including the Charter rights of all Canadians.

The Carter case concerned every Canadian's Charter right to a humane death, free of intolerable suffering. The decision is not full of legalese. It's pretty straightforward. The link is above, read it. You can understand it. Even an English-major like Justin or Gerry could understand it. We are a nation of laws, supposedly. The powerful ruling of the Supreme Court of Canada binds the federal government, Liberal or Tory.

So what did the prime minister and ex-Justice Minister Jody do? They took your Charter rights and mine and chiseled them down to something they liked better. They passed legislation abridging your Charter rights on something as critical as the right to a humane death.

Jody's thuggishness came through in the case of a horribly ill Alberta woman, known as "E.F.".  This was one of those intolerable suffering situations for which the Supreme Court of Canada, 9-0, said fell within the Charter protection. Only not for Justin and not for Jody.

To hear Wilson-Raybould tell it, E.F. "was suffering from a mental illness and ... a psychiatrist had approved (her) eligibility for medical assistance over Skype." 

"I don't think that's a situation that we want to get into," she warned Liberals at the ruling party's national convention in Winnipeg.

The justice minister has repeatedly referred to the E.F. case while urging parliamentarians to pass Bill C-14, the government's proposed new law on assisted dying, by Monday. She's argued that many doctors will refuse to provide medical assistance in dying in the absence of a legal framework while others may provide it to vulnerable people who shouldn't be eligible — like E.F., in Wilson-Raybould's judgment.

The truth:

E.F.'s application for an assisted death was supported by three doctors: her long-time attending physician — who had treated her for 28 years, including referrals to several psychiatrists and at least one neurologist — an assisting doctor and a psychiatrist with expertise in E.F.'s condition, who reviewed her medical file but did not examine her.

E.F., whose name has never been disclosed to protect her and her family's privacy, had suffered for nine years from a psychiatric illness called "severe conversion disorder." It caused her muscles to spasm involuntarily, producing constant pain and migraines and rendering her effectively blind, incapable of walking and often incapable of eating.

To hear Jody tell it, E.F. just had a case of the "downers." That's our justice minister, really?

All three doctors agreed that E.F. was competent and enduring intolerable suffering that was irremediable. The Alberta Court of Appeal agreed, in the process blasting a hole in the rationale that the federal government has used to justify the restrictive approach taken in Bill C-14.

But, if it was politically expedient to this Liberal government, Justin and Jody were plenty willing to dish out a life sentence of unconscionable cruelty in defiance of the Supreme Court of Canada and the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. The upshot of their self-serving callousness is that, across the country, people with degenerative terminal illnesses are having to opt for assisted death months earlier out of fear that some day they may be unforeseeably incapable of invoking their rights, forcing them to die in lingering anguish just as the prime minister and his ex-justice minister would prefer it.

Of course this is the very sort of chicanery you can routinely get from a "false majority" government like Trudeau's. Your Charter rights will be shaped by their partisan political interests. It's illegal. It's undemocratic. It's brutally wrong.

So I'm sorry if I don't have a lot of sympathy for Jody or a lot of respect for Justin either.  This isn't about Jody standing on principle. That's never been much of an issue for her in the past. Jagmeet, Andrew Scheer, Justin Trudeau, or Jody Wilson-Raybould - to me they're just a pack of opportunists. I wasn't going to vote for any of those snarling curs anyway.

The Breakdown of Governance

As a global civilization we really have behaved terribly.

For  couple of weeks I've been working on a piece on pollution. Greenhouse gas is a part of this problem but just one.

We rely on Earth for everything that keeps us alive. It provides the air that we breathe, the water that we drink, the food that we eat and the resources we use to build our civilization, everything from sewer mains to cheap and abundant fossil fuels to base and exotic ores.

Nature also empties civilization's bed pan. It cleanses our waste water. It absorbs our atmospheric emissions and distributes them in a variety of ways, providing CO2 for photosynthesis, transmitting upwards of a quarter of man-made CO2 into the oceans and holding much of the rest for centuries while it degrades. Other pollution is cleansed as it passes down our rivers and into lakes or out to the sea.

The Earth has done a good job for us in handing our pollution but there's a snag. Earth is a finite planet. It can only process a finite quantity of mankind's waste and we have never tried to identify much less stay within those boundaries.

Now, that waste and pollution is backing up. It's akin to homeowners when the sanitary sewer floods their basement. It manifests in a variety of ways including algae blooms that foul our rivers and lakes, coastal dead zones, swathes of plastic circling in our oceans, fish kills and more. We're already losing this one and it's just going to get worse. Sepsis on a civilizational scale.

Both the greenhouse gas problem and the waste and pollution problem are anchored in the neoliberal order with its constant quest for exponential growth. "The economy," which has been elevated to an institution unto itself now rivalling the political institution, sees to it that the environmental damage it causes is kept off the books. With the complicity of cooperative governments it is taken off the hook.

Just as the gentle climate of the 60s and 70s is gone and, we're told by some really educated people, never to return, at least not for many centuries, the clean world of the past is also a thing of the past. The planet is just going to get dirtier and more foul as we've overwhelmed Earth's ability to clean up after us. And, like a planetary form of sepsis, bad things probably await.

In the early years of this blog I assembled a list of natural and man-made calamities that confronted human civilization and tried to make sense of them. It struck me that, somehow, they all had to be linked. I looked and looked for the common threads. Eventually they emerged. There were three threads - climate change, overpopulation and over-consumption/exhaustion of resources. We had charted ourselves a course to our own destruction. Ouch, not very nice.

Anthropologist Jared Diamond convincingly argued that, faced with multiple existential threats, you must either solve all of them or you'll succeed at none of them. His logic is sound and he has ample research to support his thesis.

So we have a world that has taken up the cause of climate change, sort of, some more than others, a few barely at all. But we're stopping well short of addressing overpopulation or our rapacious excess demands on the planet's resources.

We live in a world where population growth has achieved rates akin to malignancy. In less that a single lifetime we've gone from 2.5 billion to more than 7.5 billion, soon to be 9 billion and possibly soaring to 12 billion in my children's lifetime.

We're consuming the planet's resources far beyond their exhaustion rate. We now consume the equivalent of 1.7 planet Earth's supply of renewables and our rate of consumption grows year upon year.  We've been very creative at meeting our demands by robbing tomorrow. It's pure sleight of hand, conjuring tricks, a civilizational Ponzi scheme. This ends badly.

Our rapaciousness is incontrovertible. It's visible to the naked eye from space where we can see the tailing ponds of Athabasca, the scourge of deforestation, the desertification of once arable farmland manifested in dust clouds that rise over China and cross the Pacific to North America, algae blooms from agricultural runoff that poison our rivers and lakes, disappearing lakes and rivers that no longer run to the sea. We can see it at our docks as the industrial fishing fleet collapses one species after another, fishing "down the food chain." We are warned that we're degrading our remaining farmland so rapidly that most of it may be barren, incapable of producing food, within sixty years.

Whether it's overpopulation, excess and unsustainable consumption, or climate change, we're living far beyond the limits of our global environment.  Humankind and our civilization cannot survive on this path. This is a question of survival.

What keeps me up at night (it certainly did last night) is the breakdown of civil governance and social cohesion around the world. At the very moment in history when mankind most needs governments that can rally their people to the cause of their own survival, governments that can unite their people and restore social cohesion, we have a world led by the likes of Donald Trump, Viktor Orban, Recep Erdogan, Theresa May, Andrzej Duda, Putin, Duterte, Sisi, MbS, Netanyahu and many others of their ilk.  We have nations whose people are fractured and therefore powerless, more deeply divided than they have been in decades. It's a world that has been left mortally weakened - socially, economically, politically, often by self-inflicted wounds, at the very moment when strength and courage and resolve are what matters most.  Even Canada is in a mess.

Neoliberalism is bad enough but, worse, we have failed to tame it in time to prevent the rise of authoritarianism and the erosion of the vital comity of nations. Without that requisite level of trust and cooperation, we're all left to our own devices and, in some corners of the world, that will probably mean war. There are no longer any great statesmen to steer us to a safer course.

Smoke & Mirrors - The Athabasca Saga Continues

Has Big Fossil been fudging the environmental assessment studies it spoon feeds to Alberta's oh-so-accepting regulator?  Apparently so.

Dozens of oilsands environmental impact studies are marred by inconsistent science that's rarely subjected to independent checks, says a university study. 

"It doesn't make any sense," says University of British Columbia biology professor Adam Ford, who published his findings in the journal Environmental Reviews. 

"You would have to go out of your way to make it this bad. It's just a symptom of the state of the industry and it's definitely a signal that we can do better."

...Energy companies planning to build oilsands projects must file an environmental impact assessment. Such assessments generally take representative species and consider, based on expert opinion, how development would affect different aspects of their habitat. 

Ford found 35 different species were studied. Only one — moose — appeared in all 30 assessments. Only 10 appeared in more than half of them.

... "What are the species we need to know about? We have experts in Canada who spend their entire lives thinking about these species. Let's get them involved so we can create robust habitat models, so that we don't have to revisit everybody's individual opinion." 

Ford says the current approach has real consequences for real people. 

"There's people who live on this land (whose) culture and way of life is tied to those animals. And we're telling them we're pretty much making this up."

They're pretty much making it all up. Sort of like how our prime minister is making up the fantasy that his government has "done the science" on the environmental safety of his (i.e. he bought it "his") pipeline and the risks bitumen poses to British Columbia's coastal waters, something refuted by Dave Shindler, the Royal Society of Canada and, oh yeah, Environment Canada.

Mueller. He's Not Done. Not Even Close.

Everytime it seems special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation must be close to wrapping up something new pops up. This time it's Robert Mercer and Steven Bannon's vote-rigging company, Cambridge Analytica, believed to have engineered voting in critical swing states in the 2016 presidential election.

A director of the controversial data company Cambridge Analytica, who appeared with Arron Banks at the launch of the Leave.EU campaign, has been subpoenaed by the US investigation into possible collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russian government. 

A spokesman for Brittany Kaiser, former business development director for Cambridge Analytica – which collapsed after the Observer revealed details of its misuse of Facebook data – confirmed that she had been subpoenaed by special counsel Robert Mueller, and was cooperating fully with his investigation.

Mueller's move also seems to be stirring the Brexit pot.

Damian Collins, chairman of parliament’s inquiry into fake news, said it was “no surprise” that Kaiser was under scrutiny by Mueller because “her work connected her to WikiLeaks, Cambridge Analytica and [its parent company] SCL, the Trump campaign, Leave.EU and Arron Banks”. 

He said it was now vital Britain had its own inquiry into foreign interference: “We should not be leaving this to the Americans.” 

Tom Watson, the deputy leader of the Labour party, echoed Collins’s statement, saying: “This is the first evidence that a significant player in the Leave.EU campaign is of interested to the global Mueller inquiry. People will be bewildered that the British government has no interest in establishing the facts of what happened.”

Wikileaks, Assange, Cambridge Analytica - linked.

... In October 2017, it was revealed that Alexander Nix, the chief executive of Cambridge Analytica, had contacted Assange in August 2016 to try to obtain emails from Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign – which indictments from Mueller’s team say were obtained by Russian military intelligence – to use in Donald Trump’s campaign. When Kaiser gave evidence to parliament last year, she was asked about her relationship with Assange and WikiLeaks but failed to reveal that she had met Assange.

It sure sounds like this is Brittany Kaiser's "come to Jesus" moment. By now she has to know when Robert Mueller comes calling the only smart move is sing baby, sing.

Because All the Rest of the News is Boring Crap, How About This to Put a Bit of Sunshine in Your Day?

Anthony, "The Wandering Weiner," Weiner is again a free man. Weiner was released after serving 15 months of a 21 month sentence in the Greybar Hotel for texting dick pics to a 15 year old girl.

Weiner is denying rumours that he may head to Muskoka  to compare notes with Tony Clement. Mr. Clement correctly points out that he never sent dick pics to any woman younger than 18.

Please, Explain This to Me

There's a bunch of sketchy hombres down in Texas. Their pedigree traces back to a notoriously corrupt energy giant, EnRon.  After EnRon imploded and the principals were sent for a long stretch in jail (except the lucky one who died first) some of the surviving alumni created a new energy company they named Kinder Morgan - after themselves.

Kinder Morgan bought a sclerotic pipeline that runs from Alberta to Burnaby, BC, that was called the Trans Mountain pipeline. They picked it up for a song - cheap, cheap, cheap.  Back then new pipelines were all the rage. Another company with a dodgy track record, EnBridge plotted to carve a new pipeline route, the Northern Gateway, to carry Athabasca bitumen from the Tar Sands to Kitimat on the northern BC coast. Kinder Morgan, meanwhile, imagined using its existing route to build a far bigger pipeline to carry that bitumen to "tidewater" on the southern BC coast.

The Conservative government of the day was all for both pipelines but failed to come through. Then the election timer went and the political parties scurried around to garner votes.

It began as a rag-to-riches story for the federal New Democrats. Some thought they might actually prevail for the first time ever to become the government of Canada. They were vying with the Conservatives for the brass ring.

In third place, struggling to climb out of the ditch that had been dug for them by a succession of weak and poor leadership, came the Liberals led by a youngster with a legendary name, "Trudeau." Third place. Not a great starting position.

Trudeau went to war. He knew what people wanted and he knew that promises, like talk, were cheap. He wanted seats in British Columbia, all that he could get and he knew what the people of urban British Columbia wanted. And so he began inspiring everybody with talk of "social licence," proclaiming that only affected communities could permit projects such as pipelines. He promised to rehabilitate the federal government's tattered relationship with First Nations. He solemnly promised to implement electoral reform, vowing that 2015 would be the last "first past the post" election the voting public would have to endure. He said all the things we wanted to hear about protecting our coast, real anti-pipeline stuff. He promised that his government would boldly fight climate change and would faithfully "follow the science."

He said all the things he knew we wanted to hear and British Columbians handed him a basketful of seats he needed to cement a majority win.

He lied. Social licence, he lied. First Nations consultation, he lied. Electoral reform, he lied. Safeguarding the environment of British Columbia, especially the pristine and vulnerable coast, he lied. Following the science, he lied.  Boldly fighting climate change, he lied.

He lied. It was all lies.

He pulled off a great upset win. He very nearly got the support of two out of five Canadian voters. Not quite two out of five. In the rancid electoral system he solemnly promised to tear asunder, you don't even need two out of five to form a majority government.

Now, given that the essence of a democracy is government with the consent of the electorate, informed consent, two out of five is not consent. You don't have the support of three out of five of those voters. That's not consent. That's not democracy. Fortunately this young guy with the legendary name who inspired us so was going to set that straight. Except that he lied. Instead he offered up a very sincere, "I'm so very sorry but, fuck you."

He did nix the Northern Gateway pipeline. Instead he set about conniving and dissembling to push through the expanded southern line, the new Trans Mountain pipeline to tidewater.

That social licence business where affected communities must be won over? That got swept aside as municipalities across British Columbia's lower mainland united in opposing the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion. The Trudeau government swept those municipalities aside.  When the people of those communities and our First Nations stood up to block this perfidy, the federal government rounded them up and threw them in jail. He lied. That social licence vow was utter nonsense to this newly minted prime minister.

This self-proclaimed climate change warrior almost overnight transformed into a bitumen baron, the prince of the Calgary Petroleum Club. He would be Big Carbon's boy and he is. Talk about a Trojan Horse.

During the election campaign, this youngster told us what we already knew, that the National Energy Board. the quasi-judicial body that approves Canada's high-carbon economy, was a stacked deck. It was rigged, dominated by shills plucked from the energy industry. What Big Fossil wanted, Big Fossil got.

Mr. Trudeau wasn't going to have any of that. No, he was going to clean house at the National Energy Board and he was going to see to it that all their "industry friendly" decisions were re-opened, reviewed, re-assessed. At least that's what he told us. He lied.

First Nations consultations. The youngster assured everyone that he was keeping that commitment. He was consulting Canada's First Nations, hearing them out, taking their views into account. They didn't see it that way and so the dispute progressed through the highest courts of the land. They didn't see it Trudeau's way either. He lied, again.

The government had to take a defensible position on the Trans Mountain expansion and so it ordered every federal department to provide their assessment and recommendations. But then, an envoy from the prime minister's office, corralled those mandarins in one room and told them, bluntly, their assessments had to support the Trans Mountain pipeline. They stacked the deck.

Vancouver's upstart online newspaper, the National Observer, interviewed senior officials about the prime minister's coercion.

Speaking on the condition of anonymity with National Observer, they say a high-ranking public servant instructed them, at least one month before the pipeline was approved, “to give cabinet a legally-sound basis to say ‘yes’” to Trans Mountain. These instructions came at a time when the government claimed it was still consulting in good faith with First Nations and had not yet come to a final decision on the pipeline.

Trudeau's then national resources minister, Jim Carr, insisted that his government had fulfilled its duty on First Nations consultation. Guess what? That was also a lie.

Sources from within different federal departments, however, provide a different perspective about how the Trans Mountain review happened. 

Their allegation is serious: that the process was rigged following lobbying by Kinder Morgan. 

According to the federal lobbying registry, the Texas company’s Canadian affiliate, Kinder Morgan Canada, reported lobbying federal officials in the government more than three dozen times in 2016 before Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced that he was approving the Trans Mountain expansion project.

To doubters, Mr. Trudeau assured them that his government "had done the science." They could safely move bitumen across British Columbia's seismically-active territory, across its many rivers and lakes, and they could safely sail an armada of supertankers through our pristine southern coastal waters. That was a lie.

Trudeau's environment minister, Dame Cathy McKenna, quietly approved the use of a particularly hellish concoction, Corexit, for bitumen spills. Even the manufacturer's labels on the barrels warn it's not safe for use in open waters. Corexit doesn't disperse oil. It binds with it and sinks it, out of sight-out of mind. Only this time it wouldn't be sinking ordinary crude. It would be disappearing toxin-laden sludge, bitumen, sending it to the sea bed where all marine life begins, the anchor of the marine food chain.

Now we've got the prime minister feeding us lie upon lie. We've got his environment minister lying to us. We've got that jackass Carr lying to us. We've got the heads of critical federal government departments forced to lie. That's a helluva lot of nonstop lying. It must be exhausting.

But our prime minister insists he's "done the science." Fair enough, let's see it. No, that's too much to ask. Well, let's ask Environment Canada and let's ask the Royal Society of Canada and let's ask Alberta's legendary hydrologist, Dave Shindler. Even Mr. Trudeau's own Enviro-Can confirms what Shindler and the Royal Society say - no, the science has not been done. He lied, again, as usual.

Is it unfair to Mr. Trudeau and his government to suggest that this persistent litany of bald faced lies isn't accidental, that there must be something they don't want to get out? I think that's not just fair but obvious.

Meanwhile, down in Texas, the hombres were getting nervous. Maybe it was time to stop beating a dead horse and just give up on the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion. Shut it down.

Faster than you can say, "first class, window seat," Trudeau had his finance minister, Morneau, winging his way to the Lone Star state with entreaties to Kinder Morgan. At first the government offered to guarantee the necessary funding  but that didn't work. And so they tried another approach - if you don't want it, why don't you sell it to us? We'll take it off your hands. Name your price. We'll write you a cheque.

And so the Trudeau government bought the Justin Trudeau Memorial pipeline, a.k.a. Trans Mountain.  Billions of dollars to buy a very old pipeline that Kinder Morgan had picked up for a song. Billions more to bury a new pipeline beside that old one. Now it appears the Kinder Morgan guys likely fleeced Morneau on the price.

It wasn't long before the scrutiny began and that seemed to goad the Trudeau government into announcing they were going to flip that pipeline to the private sector, suggesting the government might even see a profit from the sale. Only the private sector wouldn't touch it. Nobody wanted that damned pipeline. Wouldn't touch it with a ten foot length of bitumen pipe.

So, with one foot on the dock and the other in the boat that's drifting into open water, Justin's Canada made the leap and became a player in the bitumen industry.  Now all those First Nations and other protesters trying to block the Trans Mountain fiasco would be clashing with Ottawa, not some bunch of bandits from Texas. Ottawa was the new Kinder-Morgan but, in fairness, it was almost as good at duplicity, deceit and manipulation as the best of them.

Then there's the Sword of Damocles hanging over human civilization, climate change. Mr. Trudeau stepped boldly onto the floor of the Paris Climate Summit in 2015 to announce "Canada's back." We were even instrumental in building a consensus around the idea that the old 2 degrees Celsius goal wasn't enough. It wouldn't avert runaway global warming. We must have more ambitious carbon-cutting targets. We must not exceed 1.5 C of warming.

Three years later this government isn't even on course to meet Stephen Harper's laughable climate change targets. It's actually falling further and further behind. At the same time this government wants to flood world markets with the most toxic, highest-carbon ersatz petroleum of them all, bitumen. It's not taking any responsibility for those emissions either. That's on someone else. We're supplying the bargain-rate guns and the bullets but it's their finger on the trigger.

Here we are. Spring can't be far off and with it the resumption of pipeline construction. A pipeline laid on a foundation of lies.  And, with it, First Nations and other opponents of this monstrous pipeline will rally, be arrested and expeditiously slung into jail. It's become assembly line justice, no defences to be heard.

I realize I've gone on at considerable length about what transpired from 2015 to today but, as they say, the devil is in the details and there are so many details here that need to be remembered to make sense of what may happen when the ground thaws.

Liberals used to see themselves as the good guys and I think that was sort of true at one time. But they've come to let "good" be defined by what passes for a Conservative party these days. That's like saying, "vote for me, at least I'm not quite as bad as the other guy."  Goodness is surely something that rests on virtue. Where's the virtue in measuring yourself against Andrew Scheer and his provincial mini-me's, Kenney, Ford and Moe?

Many today are focused on this prime minister and ex-justice minister Jody. That might be a tale of corruption. It might not. Does it really matter? If you're looking for corruption look at that pipeline, look at this government's rank dishonesty, and then glance over your shoulder at a world about to burst into flames.

Please, explain this to me. Why, if this is so important to Canada, does it have to be cloaked in endless lies?

How Stupid Is Donald Trump?

Fresh from signing a national emergency declaration, the Mango Mussolini stepped behind a microphone in the Rose Garden and told reporters there's really no emergency. He just wanted to build the wall, his true fetish, a little faster.



At the 2:50 mark Trump says, "I could have built the wall over a longer period of time. I didn't need to do this but I'd rather do it much faster." Ergo: national emergency. What a chump.

There's a Reason They Called it MAD.

They were all the rage in my day. Tactical nuclear weapons, mini-nukes, or "those little bags of instant sunshine."

Somewhere around here I've got a then-"secret" field manual laying out how these weapons were to be used in the event of a massive Soviet invasion of western Europe.  All eyes were on the Fulda Gap, two corridors through which it was expected a flood of Soviet and Warsaw Pact tanks would pour into the central German plain and then on to the English Channel.  The idea was that those corridors provided convenient "choke points" where massed Soviet tanks and vehicles might be eliminated with tactical nukes delivered by NATO fighters including Canada's CF-104 Starfighters.

It was a dangerous gambit. There were so many unknowns. Would it encourage the Soviets to use similar weapons to annihilate NATO bases and our forces in the field?  Might an exchange of low-yield nukes escalate into a full-blown, civilization ending exchange of ICBM volleys?  The theory, as I understood it at the time, was a hope that using nukes to block a Soviet surprise attack would buy both sides two, maybe even three days to cool down and negotiate some way out of Armageddon.

With time the luster of tactical nuclear weapons faded.  Sure there were still arsenals of B-61 gravity bombs (above) scattered about. There still are. Most of the other stuff - the atomic cannon, the nuclear depth charge, that sort of thing has gone.

That sleeping giant is stirring again and, in a world already facing a variety of potentially existential threats, it does feel like "piling on."



Russia, meanwhile, is fielding new nuclear delivery systems of its own.  Among them are a robotic nuclear-powered, nuclear-armed submarine that could travel very deep, very fast, over very long-ranges, navigating its way into America's coastal ports and naval bases. There's also, according to Putin, a nuclear powered, nuclear armed cruise missile. There's a new nuclear submarine-launched Russian missile and Putin has just pledged to develop a new intermediate-range nuclear missile. How does that grab ya?

Fortunately we've got a very rational, very stable genius in the White House. Thank God and the United States of America for that.

Millennials' Empty Whinging

Climate change has sparked a lot of inter-generational controversy.  Millennials, in particular, are fond of blaming it all on the Boomer generation, disingenuously distancing themselves from the problem. In a word, that's rubbish.

You don't see millennials disproportionately going to jail to stop the Justin Trudeau Memorial Pipeline to tidewater.  That's mainly First Nations and life-long, law-abiding greyhairs defying the government to defend the environment and our grandchildren's future.

It's not millennials standing up to fight this. No, the fight has mainly skipped their generation. It's these kids who are fighting for the future.

They're inspiring George Monbiot to sing their praises.

My generation and the generations that went before have failed you. We failed to grasp the basic premise of intergenerational justice: that you cannot apply discount rates to human life. In other words, the life of someone who has not been born will be of no less value than the life of someone who already exists. We have lived as if your lives had no importance, as if any resource we encountered was ours and ours alone to use as we wished, regardless of the impact on future generations. In doing so, we created a cannibal economy: we ate your future to satisfy our greed. 

It is true that the people of my generation are not equally to blame. Broadly speaking, ours is a society of altruists governed by psychopaths. We have allowed a tiny number of phenomenally rich people, and the destructive politicians they fund, to trash our life-support systems. While some carry more blame than others, our failure to challenge the oligarchs who are sacking the Earth and to overthrow their illegitimate power, is a collective failure. Together, we have bequeathed you a world that – without drastic and decisive action – may soon become uninhabitable. 

Every day at home, we tell you that if you make a mess you should clear it up. We tell you that you should take responsibility for your own lives. But we have failed to apply these principles to ourselves. We walk away from the mess we have made, in the hope that you might clear it up.

Oh, I know, I know. Millennials are at that stage in life where they're building their careers, buying their homes, having their babies. Not much time left over for anything but whinging.  Wait a second. Did I say having babies? Yes they are, plenty of them. That's not an excuse for sitting this one out. That's all the more reason to take a stand, dig in, protect those precious little babies, carve out the best possible future for them that you can. It's no excuse that it might (if you do it right, probably will) land you in jail even if that means a criminal record and no more winter getaways in Florida, California, Vegas or Hawaii, no more cross-border shopping.

You freely blame an older generation for something they didn't understand, not in time, but your kids, that's a different story entirely. You did that with your eyes wide open. Now act like it.

Brexit - the Madness Ensues

What do Theresa May and Jaques Parizeau have in common? They both see/saw the electorate as lobsters in a pot.

Parizeau made the clumsy remark in the 2006 Quebec sovereignty referendum that, thanks largely to Jean Chretien's neglect, Parizeau very nearly won.

Parizeau's "lobster" reference was about "leave" voters who might be won over by assurances of follow-on negotiations with Ottawa, a second chance, etc. that conveyed the idea that the vote wouldn't be a trip over the cliff if the PQ won. Instead, he confided to his associates, those gullible voters, once the referendum succeeded would be like lobsters in a boiling pot. The PQ would have the unilateral right to secede from confederation regardless. If the gullibillies were duped, so what?

Theresa May is taking a somewhat similar approach to Brexit. Sure the Leave campaign might have rigged the vote - Cambridge Analytica, dodgy campaign finance irregularities, laughably empty assurances pulled straight out of Nigel Farage's ass - but, so what? Who cares if the razor-thin vote for Leave was manipulated? Who cares if no one had to give voters the truth about Brexit? Who cares about the shift in public opinion? Who cares if the Irish problem was not foreseen and remains unresolved? What matter if, less than two months before Britains' date with the headsman, nobody still knew what Brexit will look like? The lobsters are in the pot, that's an end of it.

The Tories are divided into camps. The opposition Labour party is divided into camps. There is no consensus in the House of Commons. Theresa May has been repeatedly rebuffed in Parliament. The country is divided, more in favour of Remain than Leave. Preparations for the chaos of a hard Brexit are virtually non-existent save for a plan to mobilize the army and, if necessary, get the Royals out of Buck House to safety.

There'll be no snap election. No second referendum. The lobsters have spoken, even if they now wish they hadn't.

If you want to experience the power of misinformation and misdirection, listen to James O'Brien's call in talk show on LBC radio.  I wrote about him the other day, even posted a clip of O'Brien shredding Nigel Farage, lie by lie. Go to YouTube and there you'll find plenty of episodes of O'Brien talking with hopelessly confused Brexiters who still believe it'll all be milk and honey. You might find that a bit shocking that, even now, many Brits are still hopelessly confused.

I have my own thoughts on what this means for modern democracy, not just in Britain but elsewhere too. They're somewhat disjointed and not fully fleshed out so I'll keep them to myself for now. I think I'll wait until the end of next month to see how May's Brexit unfolds.

He's Done It

Donald Trump has kept his threat. He has declared a "national emergency" for the US Mexico border. He will use it to siphon funds from the American military or disaster preparedness agencies to build his fetish wall. Trump's main argument? He claims, despite a mountain of evidence to the contrary, that America is just now facing an "invasion" of illegals from the south infiltrating across the border.

With this declaration Trump erases any doubt that he respects or even understands the US Constitution and its vaunted checks and balances.

Let the lawyering ensue.

Weaponizing Words

 The fabrication industry is alive and, sadly, well. What we used to equate with cellar operations on Red Square now fuels Fox News, talk radio, even America's venerated Oval Office.

If there was a word to describe the modern fabrication industry it might be "inartful." Trump's tweets, for example, are only convincing to those who need no convincing, the cult of believers and they're a truly dim lot. It is indeed inartful, a clumsy mishmash of brazen lies, baseless rumours and illogic. No one is going to win any Pulitzer prizes for it and yet, to a degree, it works.

Misinformation is powerful and it is dangerous. So dangerous that an artificial intelligence research institute, OpenAI, has decided not to let its latest genie out of the bottle for fear it would be weaponized and used against the American people.

From MIT Technology Review:

"Russia has declared war on the United States after Donald Trump accidentally fired a missile in the air. 

"Russia said it had 'identified the missile’s trajectory and will take necessary measures to ensure the security of the Russian population and the country’s strategic nuclear forces.' The White House said it was 'extremely concerned by the Russian violation' of a treaty banning intermediate-range ballistic missiles. 

"The US and Russia have had an uneasy relationship since 2014, when Moscow annexed Ukraine’s Crimea region and backed separatists in eastern Ukraine."

That story is, in fact, not only fake, but a troubling example of just how good AI is getting at fooling us.

That’s because it wasn’t written by a person; it was auto-generated by an algorithm fed the words “Russia has declared war on the United States after Donald Trump accidentally …” 

The program made the rest of the story up on its own. And it can make up realistic-seeming news reports on any topic you give it. The program was developed by OpenAI, a research institute based in San Francisco. 

The researchers set out to develop a general-purpose language algorithm, trained on a vast amount of text from the web, that would be capable of translating text, answering questions, and performing other useful tasks. But they soon grew concerned about the potential for abuse. “We started testing it, and quickly discovered it’s possible to generate malicious-esque content quite easily,” says Jack Clark, policy director at OpenAI. 

Clark says the program hints at how AI might be used to automate the generation of convincing fake news, social-media posts, or other text content. Such a tool could spew out climate-denying news reports or scandalous exposés during an election. Fake news is already a problem, but if it were automated, it might be harder to tune out. Perhaps it could be optimized for particular demographics—or even individuals.

...OpenAI does fundamental AI research but also plays an active role in highlighting the potential risks of artificial intelligence. The organization was involved with a 2018 report on the risks of AI, including opportunities for misinformation (see “These are the ‘Black Mirror’ Scenarios that are leading some experts to call for secrecy on AI”).

Orwell, Huxley? Maybe it's time to move them out of the "fiction" section.

It's On. Trump to Declare National Emergency.

It came straight from the mouth of the Republican Senate leader, Mitch McConnell. That reptilian old bastard announced that Trump will sign the bipartisan funding bill, preventing another shutdown, and he will, at the same time, issue a national emergency declaration to appropriate funds for his border wall.

Great.

That clears the way for the Democrats. If Trump can use the national emergency power for a blatant pretence, the Democrats will have no problem when it's their turn to declare destructive climate change a national emergency. That could be a game changer.

Happy Valentine's Day

Okay, I'm a curmudgeon.

Face it Liberals, the Fix is In.

The best argument I have heard in defence of SNC-Lavalin and how this government jury-rigged the criminal code is that it's too big to fail. The people of Quebec, we're told, love Lavalin. It makes them proud. It makes them happy.

Sure it has a rich history of corruption from a decade of bribing Gaddafi's people to that Montreal hospital scandal (Arthur Porter) and the Jacques-Cartier bridge fiasco but so what? And let's not forget that other problem - getting disbarred from bidding on World Bank projects.

In September 2013, SNC-Lavalin and its affiliates composed 115 of the 117 Canadian companies that were part of 250 total companies blacklisted from bidding on the World Bank's global projects. James David Fielder, the bank's manager, stated, “As it stands today, the World Bank debarment list includes a high number of Canadian companies, the majority of which are affiliates to SNC-Lavalin Inc.” The companies were debarred due to an investigation relating to the Padma Bridge project in Bangladesh, where World Bank investigators worked with RCMP officers to make a collective action against corruption.

Let's dwell a moment on this Deferred Prosecution Agreement business that was enacted at Lavalin's request and without any debate by Mr. Trudeau's government.

The entire rationale for it is that, without DPA, Lavalin would be barred from government contracts for a decade. That, in turn, would be the death knell for Lavalin and put thousands of Quebecers out of work.

Let's say that all that's true. Without the DPA, Lavalin goes down. It needs those government contracts and it is too big to fail.

If Lavalin did crater, would those contracts go unfilled? No, of course not. We have other engineering companies. One, perhaps many of them, would get those contracts. They would employ people to do the work. The work would get done.

Here's the thing. If the government is going to such lengths to sweep the stables for one pony, it's that one pony that's destined for greatness. Amending the criminal law of the land for one firm would be pointless unless that favoured firm goes on to "win" those contracts. If you can rewrite the criminal law to make that happen do you think the government won't have its thumb on the scale when it comes time to tender. It's a time-honoured game to write tenders to suit the preferred bidder.

You're not going to those lengths to give the company a legal leg-up and then give those contracts to some other firm that can't offer a similar political payoff. You're not going to take this heat only to hand those supposedly "life and death"  contracts to some other contender.

There's an election in eight months and the guy who just fixed the law needs those Quebec seats now more than ever. Quid pro quo. Lavalin wins, the Liberals win. The fix is in.

The Green New Deal Isn't Radical. What We've Done to The Earth Is.

America's Green New Deal initiative is running into pushback from those who denounce it as "radical."  We've come to understand radical to mean something reckless, scary even dangerous. It actually can mean something progressive, restorative or profound.

The GND couples progressivism to reverse inequality with environmental action to tame climate change. In the OECD, the league of developed nations, the US is the undisputed champ when it comes to inequality. On climate change, the Trump nation is doubling down on fossil energy of all descriptions virtually anywhere resources are to be found by whatever means is most profitable. (Sounds a bit like Canada, eh?)

GND only looks revolutionary because of the horrible conditions that exist across the United States.

A few days ago I posted a quote from former law professor turned environmental activist, Gus Speth, who observes that our ability to tackle climate change isn't a function of our scientific prowess:

"The top environmental problems are selfishness, greed and apathy, and to deal with these we need a cultural and spiritual transformation. And we scientists don’t know how to do that."

He's right. Right now it does come down to selfishness, greed and apathy and we too are in the grip of those things up here north of the 49th.

It's pure selfishness, greed and apathy that will keep Canada from meeting the call for all nations to slash greenhouse gas emissions by half by 2030. Our government is in court right now in a pissing contest with a gaggle of recalcitrant provinces over a minuscule carbon tax. These are governments that would douse themselves in gasoline and light a match before they would entertain the idea of 50 by 2030. Ain't gonna happen, not a hope, not even if our last chance to avert runaway global warming depends on it and it does.

We're also going to need something radical to counter the triumph of selfishness, greed and apathy in Canada. We are selfish. We don't give a tinker's dam for the rest of the world, especially those people in countries most vulnerable to the ravages of climate change. We are greedy. We want every goddamned barrel possible of climate busting bitumen in the holds of tankers flooding world markets overseas. And we, you and me, the people of Canada are disgracefully apathetic about what these governments are doing in our name.

Science has done its part. Now it has run into a wall. That wall is us. We need a Green New Deal, a radical plan, to tear down that wall.

When It Comes to Talk Radio, This Guy Is a Rock Star.

If you can access LBC, "Leading Britain's Conversation" radio, you can catch this guy, James O'Brien. I've not heard anything remotely like this in Canada. Here, O'Brien, with the rapier logic of a good barrister, takes on Nigel Farage



How do you get LBC in Canada? There may be other ways but I access it via my Amazon Echo device - "Alexa, play LBC radio."

O'Brien's show is 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. Greenwich Mean Time (GMT). You should be able to figure out what that is in your time zone.

For the entire LBC lineup, you can even find Farage's show if you like, it's all to be had at LBC's web site.

CBC's Legendary Correspondent, Joe Schlesinger, Has Died.

Many Canadians, perhaps not the young, will recall former CBC correspondent Joe Schelsinger's career. He reported from every corner of the world. But what about his retirement? He explained it all to Rick Mercer.

BC First Nations Take Trudeau to the Wood Shed

That's what we need. Something else to sour the relationship between British Columbia's First Nations and the sitting government in Ottawa.

The Union of BC Indian Chiefs is rallying to defend Jody Wilson-Raybould against what it claims are racist and sexist attacks by individuals inside Trudeau's inner circle.

The B.C. group — headed by Grand Chief Stewart Phillip — urged Prime Minister Justin Trudeau "to take responsibility for your behaviour and that of your government," and called into question his commitment to the Crown-Indigenous relationship. 

"If you do not condemn these harmful statements and apologize ... you not only reaffirm a colonial belief system that Indigenous women are inferior and disposable, but the hypocrisy of your professed feminism and 'most important relationship' with Indigenous people will be laid bare for all Canadians to see," the group's release concludes.

Hey, Trudeau Didn't Start this Political Meddling With Justice.

Justin Trudeau is responsible for sneaking that corporate diversion authority in a 500-page omnibus bill. That was underhanded. That doesn't make him some monster, an outrageous abuser of Canadian values. Let's go back one administration to the days of Shifty Steve Harper.

Zero for thirty three. That was the outcome of Stephen Harper's political persecution of former Tory senator Michael Dennis Duffy.  33 charges, talk about the "kitchen sink."

The RCMP was so badly knotted that it had to invent the "immaculate bribe" in which there was just one party, Duffy.

Early on in the Duffy fiasco I discussed the case with a mutual friend who was involved with the defence. I put in my two cents worth - this wasn't a case of bribery by Duffy but a case of extortion by Nigel Wright, Harper with the collaboration of the Tory leadership in the Senate and prominent individuals within the Conservative Party.

The key was right there staring everyone in the face. It was the Duffy email, leaked to CTV's Bob Fife that brought the skulduggery into the public eye.

The Duffy email, which he sent to his supposed confidantes, outlined the deal that Harper and Wright had orchestrated for him. It was dated, we knew when it was sent, and that was critical to the case. Pretty much everything that happened after the leak was disputed but not that email nor what ensued in the weeks after it was sent but before it reached Fife.  Those events were all locked in. There was no way to make those facts disappear.

Duffy's email set out terms and conditions of the deal, all of which came to pass. He was to shut up, stop talking to the press. He was to stop cooperating with the Deloitte auditors investigating various Senators and their expenses. He would be given the money and would use it to pay off his Senate tab. And the PMO would see to it that the Senate report went "easy on" Old Duff. All of that duly transpired.

This all unraveled due to one thing and just one thing - Duffy's incredibly stupid email. Everything described by Duffy as "the deal" came to pass and, without that leaked email, the public would never have been the wiser. Duffy stopped cooperating with the auditors. He was given the money. He paid off his Senate tab. The Tory leadership in the Senate laundered the auditor's report on the Cavendish Cottager. Problem solved.

Then that email got into Bob Fife's hands and with that Harper, Wright and the Senate hangers-on scrambled to create a narrative that absolved them of anything untoward and heaped all the blame on Duffy.

They knew Duffy had two huge vulnerabilities - a wonky heart and an empty purse. How better to bury him than with a massive criminal indictment that would easily exceed his entire net worth? And, with the assistance of the RCMP and a cooperative Crown Counsel, that's exactly what they set out to do.

The whole "immaculate bribe" business, a bribe that had only one party, was as clumsy as it was obvious. Without pursuing Duffy and Duffy alone, Nigel Wright would be implicated. Wright, meanwhile, was telling anyone who would listen that, if he went down, he'd be taking others with him. Others, perhaps like Stephen Harper? A conspiracy? Sure.

When Justice Vaillancourt acquitted Duffy of every charge that had been used to try to bury him he specifically mentioned that there was plenty of evidence adduced at trial of serious crimes only he didn't have the real criminals before him in the prisoner's dock.  He didn't name names. He didn't have to.

So today's Harper-loving Tories can hardly be heard to be outraged at political meddling in the judicial process, not when not that many years back their revered leader put on a master class in judicial meddling.

Jody Resigns, Lawyers Up

This won't calm Trudeau's waters. ex-Justice Minister Jody has resigned from cabinet.

In a statement issued Tuesday morning, Wilson-Raybould announced she submitted her resignation as Minister of Veterans Affairs and said she has retained legal counsel to determine what she can and cannot talk about within the confines of solicitor-client privilege over the SNC-Lavalin affair. 

Her decision comes after a bombshell report by the Globe and Mail last week alleged senior officials with the Prime Minister’s Office pressured her to intervene and urge prosecutors to cut a deal to save SNC-Lavalin from going to trial over corruption and fraud charges.

She refused, the report said, and was subsequently demoted from the position of attorney general to Minister of Veterans Affairs.

A Political Thumb On the Scales of Justice

In today's Toronto Star veteran columnist, Tom Walkom, writes that it's now lawful for Canadian politicians to influence judicial proceedings.

Trudeau slipped that authority into a 500-page omnibus bill trusting that no one would notice and no one did - until now. The resulting SNC-Lavalin dust-up has brought out the usual Trudeau apologists to defend the measure as a necessary reality in the modern economy. I disagree.

What we're seeing is not an accommodation of commercial reality but another ceding of power from the public to the corporate sector.

The absolutely ruinous (for most) era of globalization, ushered in by Reagan, Thatcher and Mulroney, weakened the relationship between the voting public and those they elect to high office. That was inevitable in the surrender of certain incidents of state sovereignty to the private sector through a litany of free trade agreements. With that some measure of governmental power was shared between the elected officials and the corporate sector. And, with that, these private interests were able to insinuate themselves between the public and their elected representatives.

America, with its now thoroughly "bought and paid for" Congress, is the poster boy for this sort of thing. A damning study out of Princeton in 2014 by two professors, Gilens (Princeton) and Page (Northwestern), documented how, when the public interest conflicted with private interests, the private interest routinely prevailed in America's Congress and state houses. It was of a scale that the authors concluded that the United States was no longer a democracy, having transitioned into a plutocracy.

Today, American corporations can do just about anything. Pay ten or twenty million and they get to walk. It's no surprise that the Brits followed suit. And it really should be no surprise that Justin did the same even if it was sneaky.

It's the commercially expedient thing to do. It appeases those in the boardrooms of our towering skyscrapers, a group this government is ever eager to please. Does that make it right? Of course not.

When you've already gifted so much sovereign power to the corporate sector, this is a humbling capitulation to the "too big to fail" enterprises. It is government, on behalf of the public, taking the knee. It is government putting its political thumb on the scales of justice if only for the well heeled - for the sake of the "national interest" of course.

We won't abuse the corporate "get out of jail almost free" card. Absolutely not. We're not the Americans or those scheming Brits. We do things the Canadian way in keeping with our much superior Canadian values, eh? Yeah, right.

What's that metaphor I'm looking for? Something to do with tents and some camel's nose. Don't worry, it'll come back to me.

While I'm waiting for that camel thing, I'll leave you with these words of warning from Theodore Roosevelt in 1910:

...now the great special business interests too often control and corrupt the men and methods of government for their own profit. We must drive the special interests out of politics. That is one of our tasks to-day. Every special interest is entitled to justice — full, fair, and complete — and, now, mind you, if there were any attempt by mob-violence to plunder and work harm to the special interest, whatever it may be, that I most dislike, and the wealthy man, whomsoever he may be, for whom I have the greatest contempt, I would fight for him, and you would if you were worth your salt. He should have justice. For every special interest is entitled to justice, but not one is entitled to a vote in Congress, to a voice on the bench, or to representation in any public office. The Constitution guarantees protection to property, and we must make that promise good. But it does not give the right of suffrage to any corporation.

...There can be no effective control of corporations while their political activity remains. To put an end to it will be neither a short nor an easy task, but it can be done.

Think You Don't Live On a Spaceship?

If humankind ever does establish a settlement on another planet the colonists will have to grow food. When they do it will look something similar to this:

But this farm isn't on Mars or some even more distant planet. It's a repurposed bomb shelter 33 metres beneath Clapham High Street in London.

Civilization has become so bloated that we now need to farm beneath our cities, on the rooftops of our downtown buildings. At the moment it's a novelty but with the rapid and ongoing degradation of the world's arable farmland this could become a necessity and, when it does, we may just get a sense of what life might be like if we colonized another planet after having exhausted this one.

Will Climate Collapse the Economy? Sure It Will.

Climate change is many things. Among them, it's a great disrupter. We are by now too familiar with scenes of torrential floods, withering droughts, crippling Polar Vortex winter storms that snarl traffic, delay flights even keep coastal ferries tied up at their docks.  We're starting to get familiar with the human toll of climate change - the dislocation, migrations, deaths. Now we're being warned to prepare for another climate change impact - the economy.

The gathering storm of human-caused threats to climate, nature and economy pose a danger of systemic collapse comparable to the 2008 financial crisis, according to a new report that calls for urgent and radical reform to protect political and social systems. 

The study says the combination of global warming, soil infertility, pollinator loss, chemical leaching and ocean acidification is creating a “new domain of risk”, which is hugely underestimated by policymakers even though it may pose the greatest threat in human history. 

“A new, highly complex and destabilised ‘domain of risk’ is emerging – which includes the risk of the collapse of key social and economic systems, at local and potentially even global levels,” warns the paper from the Institute for Public Policy Research. “This new risk domain affects virtually all areas of policy and politics, and it is doubtful that societies around the world are adequately prepared to manage this risk.”

...The authors examine how the deterioration of natural infrastructure, such as a stable climate and fertile land, have a knock-on effect on health, wealth, inequality and migration, which in turn heightens the possibility of political tension and conflict. 

The paper stresses the human impacts go beyond climate change and are occurring at speeds unprecedented in recorded history.

Well that will be a kick in the nuts to the political caste, including our own, who have put expanding the economy - perpetual, exponential growth, a.k.a. malignancy - above all else including preparing a viable future for young Canadians and generations to follow.

Climate change may undermine neoliberalism but not before the dereliction of our political leaders exacts a human toll, likely a lasting human toll.

Climate change is exacting a toll here on the wet coast. Who would have imagined three snow days in a row, conditions severe enough to make it unsafe for our ferries to ply our inland waters? Then again who would have imagined this influx of newcomers out of the south - humpback whales, transient orca, superpods of white sided dolphins, into our waters?

Evidence on the deterioration of natural systems is presented with a series of grim global statistics: since 2005, the number of floods has increased by a factor of 15, extreme temperature events by a factor of 20, and wildfires sevenfold; topsoil is now being lost 10 to 40 times faster than it is being replenished by natural processes; the 20 warmest years since records began in 1850 have been in the past 22 years; vertebrate populations have fallen by an average of 60% since the 1970s, and insect numbers – vital for pollination – have declined even faster in some countries.

Humanity is interconnected with every other lifeform on our planet. If they die off, so do we. You would never know that from the cavalier attitude of our leaders, the very people we entrust with the future of our grandkids. To them we hand the power to deal with these threats but they're far more concerned with building pipelines and flooding world markets with climate destroying bitumen than the safety and welfare of the public, especially our younger generations.

From our prime minister on down, from the Liberal Party to the Conservative Party, even to the NDP, we're beset with their "not just yet" attitude that ignores these looming threats, no longer on the distant horizon but much closer, in the belief they can still make hay while the sun shines.

This report, like the hundreds that preceded it over the past decade, will be down the Memory Hole within a few days.  I've been warned and you've been warned and they've been warned and there's not much more a report like this or all the others can do against the nihilistic wall of neoliberalism.

"LavScam" - Gee, That Sounds Like "AdScam"

I don't know who coined the term "LavScam" to describe the SNC-Lavalin controversy but it does bring back memories of a real Liberal scandal during the government of a fellow named Chretien that set back the Liberal Party a full decade and, even now, lingers in the minds of many Canadians.

That first one, that was a doozie. No "alleged" wrongdoing. That was real meat & potatoes larceny to the tune of millions and millions of dollars purloined from the public purse.  Liberal people were convicted. Liberal people went to jail.

Ordinary people, the Great Unwashed, have long memories and the Sponsorship Scandal, AdScam is still the standard cudgel for those who assume if something is Liberal it must be corrupt.

What is that line about letting he who is without sin cast the first stone?

As I've said before, I don't have a dog in this fight. I carry no brief for Justin Trudeau or ex-Justice Minister Jody.  You may think she's terrific. To me she was instrumental in flouting the clear, per curiam decision of the Supreme Court of Canada on assisted dying in the Carter case, denying the Charter rights of desperately ill Canadians for political convenience. I've had no respect for her or Justin since then.  For my money they can both go hang.

Liberal faithful slam Jody. The even further rightwing party, Scheer's jackals, slam Justin. I don't care. I scraped the Liberal off my boots back when Ignatieff held court. To me, this looks like more of the same old, same old - and that's boring.

Ethics Commissioner to Investigate

For those who are following this SNC-Lavalin dustup, the Ethics Commissioner has launched an investigation into allegations that the PMO interfered in the prosecution.