Author Archives: brucescribe

Jun 04 2014
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Democracy, Politics, Privacy

Who watches the watchdog?

 

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The degree to which Daniel Therrien will faithfully execute the duties of his office as Canada’s incoming privacy commissioner rests entirely on his appreciation of the meaning of one word.

Call it independence or objectivity or dispassion, but the mandate and mission of this parliamentary watchdog are both clear and specific. 

They go like this, straight from the official record: “The mandate of the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada (OPC) is overseeing compliance with both the Privacy Act, which covers the personal information-handling practices of federal government departments and agencies, and the Personal Information Protection and Electronics Documents Act (PIPEDA), Canada’s private sector privacy law. The mission. . .is to protect and promote the privacy rights of individuals.” 

In this, “the Commissioner works independently from any other part of the government to investigate complaints from individuals with respect to the federal public sector and Sutherland private sector.” 

So, then, what are Canadians to make of Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s choice to succeed Interim Commissioner Chantal Bernier? By all appearances, the two could not possess more divergent pedigrees. 

Like her predecessor, Jennifer Stoddart, Ms. Bernier comes from the traditional, bible-thumping school of public watchdoggery, preaching the gospel of accountability in all things government-related, come what may. 

In contrast, Mr. Therrien’s resume reads like that of a consummate insider, a man who appears to be more comfortable with going along to get along. His official bio, posted to the Prime Minister of Canada’s website, is unapologetic, even cheerful:

“In his current role, among other notable achievements, Mr. Therrien co-led the negotiating team responsible for the adoption of privacy principles governing the sharing of information between Canada and the U.S. under the Beyond the Border Accord, an umbrella agreement to enhance trade and security which includes 33 specific arrangements. These principles provide for the implementation, harmonization and augmentation of safeguards found in Canadian and U.S. Privacy legislation.”

To his supporters (among them, somewhat incongruously, is Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau), Mr. Therrien is the model of perspicacity, experience and knowledge – exactly what the office he will soon fill needs. To his detractors, he’s a catastrophe waiting to happen.

In a letter to Mr. Harper, NDP Leader Thomas Mulcair asserted, among other things, that Mr. Therrien “has nether the neutrality nor the necessary detachment to hold this position.” 

Michael Geist, an electronic security consultant, also expressed concerns. “Surely, the government is sending a bit of a signal that in an environment when there were other privacy commissioners and people with deep backgrounds on the privacy side, that they’ve chosen to focus on someone whose most recent emphasis has been on safety and security,” he told the Toronto Star last week. 

In a different time, none of this would have captured the public’s imagination quite so compellingly. After all, the privacy office, itself, wields more moral than legal persuasion over the affairs of public servants. It reports to Parliament, which is, for the moment, numerically weighted in favour of the sitting government. 

Still, the digital age – the age of whistle-blowers like Edward Snowdon and Julian Assange – has produced its very own brand of fear and loathing, where big brothers lurk around every street corner just under the closed circuit TV monitors that record you picking your nose as you jaywalk to work. 

Now, along with all the other bad news to digest, comes a front-page report in the New York Times this week that alleges the National Security Agency in the United States is “harvesting huge numbers of images of people from communications that it intercepts through its global surveillance operations for use in sophisticated facial recognition programs, according to top-secret documents.”

In this environment, Mr. Therrien’s nomination deserves the scrutiny it’s getting.

He may well be the dutiful, responsible, careful thinker his backers describe. He may be better-equipped to exercise his duties than any parliamentary watchdog, before or since. He may be a mandarin who manages to cross over from public servant to ombudsman, seamlessly. 

But will he be independent, the essence of his task? 

Time – that commodity this democracy is running down every day – will tell.

 

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Jun 03 2014
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Education, Politics

It’s time to walk the talk on education

 

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Fisheries and Oceans minister Gail Shea’s heart is in the right place when she says that education is the key to Canada’s long-term prosperity.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s heart (such as it is) is likewise in the right place when he urges the international community to emulate this country’s commitment to improving maternal and child welfare around the world. 

Still, actions always speak louder than words, and when it comes to putting their money where their mouths are here at home – where functional illiteracy rates are among the highest in the industrialized world and the federal government’s conception of early childhood education is nothing more than a grab bag of measly tax giveaways to individuals and families – national leaders are mute to the point of perpetual silence.

“A skilled workforce leads to a stronger economy with more and better jobs,” Minister Shea told a graduating class of Holland College in Prince Edward Island last week. “For governments, more people working means more people paying taxes. Taxes are necessary for providing things like health care and education. So, it is an investment in the future, it is an investment in you, and it is an investment in the province and the country, as well.”

She added: “Everybody graduating here tonight has recognized that having a better education and greater skills will help you achieve success.”

Elsewhere, Prime Minister Harper told participants in a three-day summit of maternal and child health, “It’s a philosophy of our government, and I think of Canadians more broadly, that we do not measure things in terms of the amount of money we spend but in terms of the results we achieve.”

Later, in an interview with the Globe and Mail, he elaborated: “We’re in a truly global world. So I do think it is in our broader, enlightened self-interest to make the world a better place. But I also do think some of these things are just worth doing in their own right. We are a very wealthy and lucky people. . .Most of us were fortunate to be born at this point in history and in this particular country.”

But how will history and this country’s future generations judge this particular point in time? 

Mr. Harper is absolutely correct. On a per capital basis, Canada is, compared with its trading partners, awash with cash. The country is set to return to surplus within the next few months and, barring unforeseen events (such as those that afflicted world financial markets in 2008), natural resources development will buoy the economy, injecting sustainable volumes of black ink into federal government coffers for years to come. 

What should we do with that boon? Should we instruct our elected leaders to return it to our individual bank accounts? Or should we take a longer, more considered view of our nation’s true source of wealth and economic durability? 

Universities and vocational colleges consistently complain that our children (when these institutions get their hands on them) are woefully ill-equipped to compete in the labour markets of the world. The kids are, in fact, not alright. Higher education scrambles to undo what lower education has done to little Johnny and Jane. 

Meanwhile, the pressure to train young people to fit existing job roles mounts, even as advanced disciplines in critical thinking, communications and cultural awareness fade to the vanishing point along the horizon most other – and less economically promising – economies as ours, dutifully chart. 

A half-century of hard-won experience in places like Norway, Sweden and Finland convincingly argues that state investments in national early childhood education programs are the best hedges against illiteracy, lassitude, crime, and social dissolution among young people.  

And yet, with few exceptions, Canada – with all its money and resources, with all its hearts in the right places – chooses to spend the money it hasn’t promised to return to taxpayers on prisons, military aircraft that don’t fly and staged commemorations of wars it may or may not have won two centuries ago. 

It’s long past time to put our money where Gail Shea’s mouth is.

 

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Jun 02 2014
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Environment, Politics

Political palaver is making global warming worse

 

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If Prime Minister Stephen Harper is waiting for his frenemy in statecraft, U.S. President Barack Obama, to establish a regulatory agenda for carbon emissions before he raises any finger but his middle ones to his critics in the environmental lobby, his patience will soon be rewarded.

Today, the putative leader of the free world introduces what one news report describes as “the most significant action on climate change in American history.”  According to the Guardian online, “The proposed regulations Obama will launch at the White House on Monday could cut carbon pollution by as much as 25 per cent from about 1,600 power plants in operation today.”

Consider that these facilities account for as much 40 per cent of all emissions in the United States, and you can’t help suspect that these rules might actually possess some gravitas for a change. 

Consider, also, that Mr. Obama is using his executive authority without the imprimatur of Congress, where nearly half of sitting Republicans publicly reject the science behind climate change. That means no pesky horse-trading when it comes to the language and substance of the new regs.

In effect, reports the Guardian, “The rules, which were drafted by the Environmental Protection Agency and are under review by the White House, are expected to do more than Obama, or any other president, has done so far to reduce the carbon dioxide emissions responsible for climate change. They will put America on course to meet its international climate goal, and put US diplomats in a better position to leverage climate commitments from big polluters such as China and India.”

Or as the president told graduates of West Point during a speech last week, “I intend to make sure America is out front in a global framework to preserve our planet. American influence is always stronger when we lead by example. We can not exempt ourselves from the rules that apply to everyone else.”

Hmmm. What say you now, Mr. Harper?

For years, Canada’s prime minister has insisted he can’t do much to further his international commitments – particularly, the ones he made in 2009 at the Copenhagen climate change conference – to reducing this nation’s carbon footprint without a clear signal and comprehensive guidelines from its largest trading partner.

Now, he has it. 

In fact, one could argue, he’s had it for nearly a year. 

“Today, President Obama is putting forward a broad-based plan to cut the carbon pollution that causes climate change and affects public health. The plan, which consists of a wide variety of executive actions, has three key pillars: Cut carbon pollution in America; prepare the United States for the impacts of climate change; lead international efforts to combat global climate change and prepare for its impacts.”

That’s an excerpt from a document entitled, “The President’s Climate Action Plan”, dated June 25, 2013. It is, apparently, the fountainhead for this week’s regulations. And, according to a recent report in the Globe and Mail, somebody in the environment ministry was well aware of the plan on the day of its unveiling last summer.

“The United States has implemented limits on emissions from the oil and gas sector that are ‘significant’ and ‘comparable‘ to those the Conservative government is considering, says a newly releases Environment Canada memo, one that contradicts Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s assertion that Canada is waiting for the U.S. regulations before it will act,” the Globe piece revealed. “The June, 2013, memo. . .was produced after President Barack Obama released his Climate Action Plan that day.”

How curious, then, that Mr. Harper – apparently oblivious to Mr. Obama’s initiative – should tell Global News in December, that regulating Canada’s oil and gas  emissions “would be best done if we could do this in concert with our major trading partner…so that’s what I’m hoping we’ll be able to do over the next couple of years.”

The good news is, of course, nothing now prevents Mr. Harper from boldly going where no westernized, reform Tory has gone before: To the front lines in the battle to save the planet from too much hot air; a commodity, it seems, that’s common to polluters and politicians, in equal measure.

 

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May 30 2014
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Economy, Politics

Keeping our own economic promises

 

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The premiers of Canada’s least economically promising provinces display a marvelous esprit de corps, becoming a cheerful band of battle-ready brothers, when their mutual enemies in Fat City rattle their swords.

So it was this week when New Brunswick’s David Alward, Nova Scotia’s Stephen McNeil, Prince Edward Island’s Robert Ghiz and Newfoundland and Labrador’s Tom Marshall emerged from the semi-regular gabfest they dub rather self-importantly, Council of Atlantic Premiers, with agreements to, in effect, throw down the gauntlet on Ottawa’s front yard.

Having agreed to harmonize apprenticeship programs across the region (finally), they raised their voices en mass and called for Ottawa to stop pushing its immigration and jobs-protection agendas in the absence of any credible research or consultation on the subjects. 

Referring to a pending report he and his provincial counterparts commissioned on the impact of federal changes to the Employment Insurance system in the Atlantic region, Premier Ghiz told the Telegraph-Journal, “What this is really about is the Atlantic provinces putting together evidence-based research to take to the federal government that will indicate how the EI changes have negatively affected our region based on the seasonal industries that we have.”

Added Premier Alward: “It’s not just about EI. We can talk about any other changes. When they impactt regions, when they impact provinces, there needs to be a level of consultation before.”

Indeed, said Premier McNeil, the federal government must stop functioning as if it were in a partnership with only itself. “There needs to be a broader consultation between governments. The national government needs to make the provinces part of the decision making that has a huge impact on the regions or programs that are affecting regions.”

Well said, and bully for all of them. Now what? 

It’s true; since snatching power from the wobbly, scandal-riddled Liberals, federal Conservatives have displayed a dreadful lack of respect for the provinces, and not just the ones that hug the East Coast. Our region has, however, always seemed to earn special contempt from the callow, black-hearted, centre-obsessed boys and girls who populate the Prime Minister’s Office. 

Government of Canada reforms to EI seem almost deliberately crafted to cause the most inconvenience and disruption possible in the Atlantic provinces, where seasonality is, alas, one of the defining characteristics of the labour market.

Meanwhile, Employment Minister Jason Kenney’s ban on temporary foreign workers in the restaurant trade will hit the region’s tourist trade disproportionately hard, as the industry draws from an immigrant labour pool that is, alongside all the other evaporating ones, shrinking.

Still, Atlantic Canada’s premiers have complained about these and other slights for years and largely to no avail. Lamentably for Mr. McNeil, et. al, this is not a national government that feels any compelling need, whatsoever, to make the provinces part of its decision making. 

In fact, the federal Tories sometimes leave the impression that if they could shut down this messy Confederation of ours and run the whole show from glass towers impressively arranged along the banks of the Rideau Canal, everyone would be much happier. 

Poorer, for sure; but happier.

In fact, a more profitable use of our regional premiers’ time and energy – given the central government’s utter intractability – would be a full-sail vision quest, the purpose of which would be to translate their periodic displays of unity and filial bonding against a common foe into pragmatic commitments to formal socio-economic cooperation in the region itself.

Atlantic Canada’s real enemy doesn’t dress in blue pinstripes and speak with an Ottawa Valley accent. 

Our real enemy is our own parochial notion that our sputtering engines of growth are somehow stronger functioning apart from one another than they are operating in concert, together. 

Our nemesis is our pride, which cleaves to centuries’ old commercial conventions, long past their best before dates, that helps maintain an ossified culture of inter-provincial barriers against the movement of trade, people and skills.

In this regard, the Atlantic premiers’ decision to take the handcuffs off apprentices   is right and correct. 

But what more can this battle-ready band of brothers do for themselves, for the people they represent, for the region whose economic promise is not yet kept?

 

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May 29 2014
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Humour

The official flora of Canada’s next province: palm trees

 

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I get that John Baird is a very important man with a very important job doing very important things, like saving the world for Stephen Harper’s democracy. But does Canada’s foreign minister have to be such a party pooper?

Specifically, as the thermometer outside my office door barely nudged 10 degrees Celcius this week did he have to throw water on the idea of this country welcoming the tropical paradise known as the Turks and Caicos Islands into its provincial fold?

“We’re not in the business of annexing islands in the Caribbean to be part of Canada, so that’s not something that we’re exploring,” Baird declared on Monday, as the premier of the Caribbean state, a British protectorate, openly flirted with the notion of he and his 29,000 fellow islanders formally becoming Canucks. 

“I’m not closing the door completely,” Rufus Ewing told reporters in Ottawa. “It is not of my mandate to close the door. What I’ll say is on the radar is some kind of relationship. I can’t say what kind of relationship it will be,” 

Still, insisted Baird: “We’re not looking at any sort of formal association with the islands.”

But, as the Globe and Mail’s editorial writer asked reasonably yesterday, “Why the heck not? Yes, the idea is slightly loopy. But a people subjected to six months a year of winter, preceded by four months of fall, are entitled to the occasional tropical daydream. And if Newfoundland could go from a British colony to Canadian province, why not some slightly more temperate islands?.”

Of course, the circumstances of Newfoundland’s entry into Confederation in 1949 were unique to that place and time (having had something to do with 15 years of government by appointment only), yet Canada’s self-styled national newspaper is not wrong about this. And its readers concur. After all, if Richard Branson gets to own a palmy getaway at the equator, why can’t we?

“Has anyone even run the numbers?” writes Peter Sutherland of Ottawa. “The cost of providing Canadian social services for some 30,000 islanders versus the money that would stay in ‘Canada’ (not the southern United States or Mexico) during the winter? Looks like this rare opportunity will once again fade as fast as my short-lived summer tan.”

Adds Mary Lazier-Corbett of Picton, Ontario: “Assuming there is an informed wish on the part of Turks and Caicos to become part of our Confederation, it would have huge advantages to Canada. . .It would. . .open up opportunities for citizens in the ‘new‘ area and force us all to rethink, rationally, what it means to be Canadian. . .Go for it!”

Finally, this word from Janice Campbell of Halifax: “Frostbitten hand to winter-numbed heart, there is so much I’d forgive the Conservatives if they did this. Puh-leeze, Mr. Baird.”

Well, Mr. Baird, the people have spoken; what say you now? Shall you stand in the corner just as the festivities kick into high gear?

“If you don’t want another prov/territory,” Saskatchewan Premier Brad Wall tweeted to the prime minister, “Turks/Caicos can join Canada as a part of Sask.”

To which Prince Edward Island Premier Robert Ghiz responded, “Hey, Brad, PEI would be happy to partner with Saskatchewan on the Turks and Caicos project!”

Replied Wall: “Now we’re talking.”

Even Mr. Baird’s colleague Conservative MP Peter Goldring likes the idea. “There are opportunities that are going to be growing in the Caribbean,” he told Global News. “I think it would be good for business if we were to develop a good strong relationship and maybe even a marriage.”

It’ll never happen, of course, because the politicos in positions of real power – never the most imaginative among us – can’t divine an immediate up side.

I, on the other hand, can think of 12. In the Turks and Caicos, average high temperatures for January, February, March, April, May, June, July, August, September, October, November, and December are, respectively: 27, 27, 28, 28, 29, 30, 31, 31, 31, 30, 29, and 28 degrees Celcius. Plus, it never gets below 20 at night.

As one gets older, these considerations acquire greater significance, especially as one obsessively checks the mercury outside my office door. 

It’s May 28 and what do you know? The temperature just shot up to 13.

Maybe John Baird is right after all. 

Turks and Caicos? 

Bah, who needs you?

 

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May 28 2014
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Uncategorized

When the new intern walks with a cane

 

In a recent issue of The Economist, an ad for the Mandarin Oriental hotel group features   Hollywood heavyweight Morgan Freeman reclining serenely on a couch, his handsome, septuagenarian face the picture of health, confidence and Cheshire Cat-like perspicacity. He is smiling as if to say, “You know I’m not going anywhere.” 

The image is oddly appropriate, as it appears directly opposite an editorial entitled “A billion shades of grey,” which examines the gathering economic and demographic tsunami of old folks who can’t afford (or just don’t want) to retire from work. 

Mr. Freeman, it’s safe to say, does not suffer from such problems. The star of cinematic triumphs, including Driving Miss Daisy, The Shawshank Redemption and Invictus, works when the work, itself, interests and (presumably) enriches him. Apparently, that includes occasionally lending out his white-whiskered mug to luxury hotel chains.

But for millions of others in the industrialized world, the choice is not so cavalier. Not surprisingly, then, society’s various workplaces are becoming inexorably geriatric. Notes The Economist: “The world is on the cusp of a staggering rise in the number of old people, and they will live longer than ever before. Over the next 20 years the global population of those aged 65 or more will almost double, from 600 million to 1.1 billion. . .(The) striking demographic trend (is) for highly skilled people to go on working well into what was once thought to be old age.”

So it is in The Great White North (pun, fully intended). A Statistics Canada study, released earlier this year, found that “many older workers who leave long-term jobs do not fully enter retirement. In fact, over one-half of workers aged 55 to 64 who left long-term jobs between 1994 and 2000 were re-employed within a decade.”

Moreover, “of Canadians who exited a long-term job at age 55 to 59, 60 per cent were re-employed within the next 10 years. This was the case for 44 mer cent of those who exited their long-term job at age 60 to 64. Men were more likely than women to be re-employed.”

We Atlantic Canadians appear to be less anxious to punch a clock while our own biological ones are clicking down to the inevitable zero hour, but the data doesn’t factor in other findings that have pointed to the East Coast’s disproportionate share of small, entrepreneurial businesses, whose moms and pops do, quite literally and often, work till they drop.

I imagine that would be me. I belong in the generational camp (right between the baby boom and Gen X) whose members often thought self-employment was a brave and noble endeavor (much like, I imagine, a trapeze artist thinks nets are for wimps). 

At any rate, I’ve been doing this for long enough that any conception of retirement seems, to me, quaintly antiquated – a notion that might have preoccupied my grandfathers when private pension plans for middle-income earners actually meant something, and equity investing was for the risk-embracing wealthy way over there, on the other side of the railroad tracks.

In fact, the western workplace is merely transforming to reflect the salient trends in our culture over the past 30 years.

Begin with a healthy disdain among policy makers, politicians and corporatists of every stripe for unions, worker welfare, protective regulations, and rational guidelines in financial markets. Add a healthy dollop of technological innovation. Sprinkle in advances in medical science and improvements in overall nutrition. Then stir.

Et voila! What you get is a super geezer ready, willing and able to deploy his vast reservoir of work and life experiences in the service of that hot, new, nameless, faceless, off-shoring entity that pays the bills until it, or he, finally succumbs – whichever comes first.

In fact, increasingly, this is how the corporate world both likes and eats its cake. As The Economist points out, “the notion of a sharp division between the working young and the idle old misses a new trend, the growing gap between the skilled and the unskilled. Employment rates are falling among younger unskilled people, whereas older skilled folk are working longer.”

That’s good news for those of us who, by necessity or choice, aren’t going anywhere.

 

May 27 2014
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Democracy, Privacy

Lest we forget our rights in the Internet age

 

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My human nature abhors a snoop, unless he would be me. I am as compelled to conceal most details of my admittedly humdrum life as I am to blow the lid off someone else’s potentially dangerous cache of secrets. 

This is why, when it comes to privacy in the age of the Internet, I do not worry overmuch about irreconcilable urges. Everyone, it seems, has them.

Earlier this month, the European Union’s Court of Justice ruled that a Spanish guy does, indeed, possess the “right to be forgotten” in cyberspace, just as he had argued, setting a precedent that could spell profound implications for privacy advocates and free-speech supporters, alike. 

According to an online news item in the Guardian, “In what could be a landmark case for internet privacy, a European court has ruled that Google must amend some of its search results. . .The test case. . .was brought by a Spanish man, Mario Costeja González, after he failed to secure the deletion of an auction notice of his repossessed home dating from 1998 on the website of a mass circulation newspaper in Catalonia. . .

(In) the advisory judgement. . .individuals have a right to control their private data, especially if they are not public figures.”

The Guardian piece goes on to report that “More and more individuals are claiming they have a ‘right to be forgotten’, particularly when the internet pulls up personal information which may appear one-sided or unfair.”

For its part, Google characterized the ruling as “disappointing” and indicated it would take its time “analysing the implications”.

Meanwhile, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales was simply gobsmacked. 

“(This is) one of the most wide-sweeping internet censorship rulings that I’ve ever seen,” he told BBC Radio 5 last week. “If you really dig into it, it doesn’t make a lot of sense. They’re asking Google. . .you can complain about something and just say it’s irrelevant, and Google has to make some kind of a determination about that. That’s a very hard and difficult thing for Google to do – particularly if it’s at risk of being held legally liable if it gets it wrong in some way.”

Moreover, he said, “Normally we would think whoever is publishing the information, they have the primary responsibility – Google just helps us to find the things that are online. . .I would expect that Google is going to resist these claims quite vigorously. I think they would be foolish not to because if they have to start coping with everybody who whines about a picture they posted last week, it’s going to be very difficult for Google.”

Still, if some authorities think it’s perfectly okay to require search engines like Google to scrub the past clean on demand, others seem determined to obtain access to the unfiltered mausoleums of information that represent the virtual lives of nearly three billion IT-savvy earthlings. 

The Government of Canada, for one, is doing its level best to shine daylight on two bills (C-13 and C-31) that would expand the snooping powers of police. According to a report in the Globe and Mail last week, these controversial pieces of legislation will “give police and other law-enforcement officials new powers to request and monitor the private data of Canadians, despite objections from privacy watchdogs.”

Where is, these watchdogs wonder, our ‘“right to be forgotten”?

In a letter, earlier this month, to Conservative MP Mike Wallace, chair of the Commons justice committee, Ontario’s Information and Privacy Commissioner Ann Cavoukian stated, “The time for dressing up overreaching surveillance powers in the sheep-like clothing of sanctimony about the serious harms caused by child pornography and cyberbullying is long past.”

In her own statement last week, British Columbia’s privacy commissioner, Elizabeth Denham, advised the feds to “separate the provisions addressing cyberbullying from those that extend law enforcement powers,” arguing that “any proposed increase to those powers must be critically examined and vigorously debated.” 

She added: “It is up to government and law enforcement agencies to make the case to Canadians as to why increased police powers are necessary.”

Canada’s various privacy commissioners and the likes of Jimmy Wales may argue interminably about which is more dangerous to a healthy democracy: Too much of an individual’s personal information concentrated hands of a powerful few; or not enough accurate information about an individual’s actions available to the great, unwashed masses.

The good news is, perhaps only, that the debate is far from settled. 

 

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May 26 2014
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Media, Politics

Making the enemies list and checking it twice

 

Beware all the liberal media vipers in our midst

Beware all the liberal media vipers in our midst

Canadian political junkies are in for a treat next month when former Conservative operative and Stephen Harper confidant Bruce Carson spills the beans about his brief sojourn at the center national power. 

But we addicts of hysteria in statecraft may not actually need his upcoming book, “14 Days: Making the Conservative Movement in Canada”, to help us comprehend the true dimension of Tory paranoia. These days, the party’s power brokers are managing to do that all by themselves.

As the Globe and Mail reported last week, Conservative officials recently sent a fundraising letter to potential contributors asking them to pony up big bucks for what is certain to be a titanic battle against the Liberal establishment and their lickspittles and  lapdogs in the mainstream media.

The Globe quoted portions of the letter from Fred DeLorey, the party’s director of political operations, thusly: 

“(The) increase in the number of seats, plus the need to expand Conservative communications and outreach. . .will require the biggest campaign budget in Conservative Party history to ensure victory next year. . .To compete for these extra new seats in 2015, our outreach and communications budget must expand too – and we must do it now. If we wait until next year, it may be too late.”

Indeed, lefties lurk around every corner.

“Despite all his verbal flubs, lack of experience, and his failure to outline any practical economic policy for Canada, Justin Trudeau is still awarded a shining halo by liberal-minded journalists and pundits who are bedazzled by their own hopes of a Liberal second coming,” Mr. DeLorey fumes.

What’s more, he instructs, “Over 80 per cent of Canadian media is owned by a cartel of just five corporations – each of which owns dozens of publications and networks under various subsidiaries and affiliates. . .The Canadian newspaper industry today is largely controlled by a small number of individual or corporate owners, which often own the television networks.”

As a result, this “media convergence has greatly complicated our Conservative Party efforts to present the unfiltered facts and foundations behind our policies for economic growth, our faith in family values and our commitment to jobs, free trade and prosperity. . .The official campaign for re-election of Stephen Harper and our Conservative majority government won’t start until next year – but in the media it seems it has already begun.”

Fie, a pox on all your wobbly Fourth Estate houses, especially the CBC, which  

“costs taxpayers too much and its operations should be privatized” before, presumably,  “inexperienced Liberals like Justin Trudeau or leftist ideologues like Thomas Mulcair” make it their official mouthpiece!

This is not the first time Tory brass have taken a swipe at Mother Corpse (or, indeed, any media that doesn’t display the word “Sun” in its corporate letterhead) in a fundraising letter. In fact, for several years now, the practice has been all but required by right-wing etiquette. 

In 2007, the late Doug Finley, who was then the Conservative Party’s campaign director, decried alleged incidents of political bias among frontline reporters at the CBC. Is this (he asked rhetorically) what $1.1 billion in taxpayers‘ money buys for hard-working, well-adjusted Canadians?

Still, though most citizens will dismiss such frantic hyperbole outright, the Tories do know their audience, which suggests that there’s less genuine fear than calculated fiat in the messaging.

The danger of a Liberal resurgence in this country is real, but right-wingers deal with their terror of fancy-pants, artsy-fartsy types by towing the party line. And they do it better than anyone else. 

That’s why, in political terms, they have more money than God (despite their persistent and disingenuous poor-mouthing). It’s also how they have effectively demonized the mainstream media for a sizable chunk of the mainstream audience of news and opinion (again, despite their absurd and disingenuous claims to victimhood at the hands of commie-influenced press barons).

Time and again, the modern incarnation of conservatism in Canada makes claims to truth where none exists and then makes quislings of all who dare question its wisdom and virtue.

Still, we political junkies wouldn’t have it any other way. Most of us are journalists, anyway. Who else but a late-stage partisan paranoiac is going to keep us on our toes?

 

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May 23 2014
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Economy, Politics

Verbal jousting won’t cure what ails New Brunswick

 

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They may know next to nothing about forging policies that actually inspire confidence in the public peanut gallery. But when it comes to mud-slinging and spin-balling, our elected leaders are bonafide artistes, each deserving a standing ovation.

So it was on Wednesday, which marked the end of the current legislative season in New Brunswick. There in Freddy Beach, dutifully providing rounds of enthusiastic applause to themselves, were Tory Premier David Alward and Liberal Leader Brian Gallant, bending all kinds of truth to score political points.

Thundered the latter: “This government was quite busy breaking its promises. They made three key promises to be elected in the last election in 2010. They promised they’d balance the books, without cutting services and without increasing taxes. It’s obvious these three promises were broken. I’m asking the premier to explain to New Brunswickers how they are supposed to believe anything in their platform when they broke the three key promises in order to be elected in 2010.”

Rejoined the premier: “We would have thought with a least the recent policy convention we would have had some clear signs with where the Liberal party stood, but all we have is no vision at all. . .The future of New Brunswick is at stake. There hasn’t been a time in many years where the stark realities, the differences between parties, will be made more clear in the coming months. We know our young people want to have the opportunity to stay here in New Brunswick instead of having no choice but to go elsewhere.”

As for the not-quite-hidden agenda behind the political theatre this week, Mr. Alward confirmed, to the edification of exactly no one, that “elections matter. . .The reality is that this election more than any in the past will make the difference in the future of the province. We have a plan and we are dead-focused on that plan, moving forward with shale gas development, moving forward with mining, our forestry renewal and moving forward with a pipeline.” 

But if elections matter, these days they seem to matter matter less to the “future of the province” than they do to the make and model of the rowboat we choose to run aground on some shoal along the not far-off horizon. 

Moncton academic Richard Saillant sounds the alarm in his excellent new book, “Over the Cliff?”, regarding the province’s looming and interrelated fiscal, economic and demographic crises: “For several decades, New Brunswick’s economy has surfed on a rising tide of labour force growth, fuelled by the baby boom generation and the steady, largely successful march of women towards equal participation in the workforce. The tide is now receding, dragging down the economy. A new Age of Diminished Expectations is upon us.”

That’s not much of a campaign platform, but it does suggest one for either Mr. Alward or Mr. Gallant, should they actually put their rhetorical cannons away and level with the electorate for a change.

The requisite soliloquy might go a little like this:

“My fellow New Brunswickers, I come not to praise my record, but to bury it. “Clearly, we need to hit the reset button in this province. All of us, Conservatives and Liberals alike, have made costly mistakes. 

“We let the size of our public service balloon out of all proportion to its utility. We’ve wasted countless millions of dollars on failed economic development initiatives and corporate welfare. We’ve put too many of our eggs in one basket. We haven’t stuck to our knitting. And, if you will permit me one last cliche, I will make you one, and only one, promise going forward: No more promises!

“Now is not the time for verbal jousting, but for non-partisan collaboration across party lines. Now is the time for dismantling ‘politics as usual‘ and for working together towards hard, but commonsensical, fixes for our problems. 

“We must finally recognize that no one – not the federal government, not the money-market lords of Manhattan, not the foreign conglomerates of the world – is coming to our rescue. It’s all on us.

“It’s time we stop huffing and puffing at each other and get on with it.”

Ah, yes, some theatre – though it be pure fiction– can be marvelously inspiring. One might even say, worthy of ovation. 

 

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May 22 2014
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Economy, Education

To reduce poverty, improve education

 

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Any political regime, regardless of ideological bent, that claims the high ground in the perennial war on poverty rallies the faithful with empty rhetoric and promises it knows it can’t possibly keep.

So it was last week when New Brunswick’s Conservative government laid out a plan to reduce penury in the province – one that looked very much like a version its predecessors in Shawn Graham’s Liberal administration introduced five years ago. 

How did that one work out for us?

“New Brunswickers want to know the results of the last plan,” Grit MLA Don Arsenault observed earlier this week. “Where do we stand now in making sure that we are heading in the right direction? The government is hiding those numbers, hiding those results, because we are just a couple of months away from the election.”

As for the new plan, Mr. Arsenault said, “There are 28 actions with no deadlines. How can the government measure whether the plan meets its objectives?”

To which Education Minister Marie-Claude Blais sneered, “It (criticism of the plan) is for political gain. That is what the members opposite want to do. That is what they like to do. There are measurables, and the measurables are being attained right now. . .We are doing all of that, and we will continue to do that.”

In fact, neither the Conservatives nor the Liberals have the foggiest notions for reducing poverty in New Brunswick. They trot out the few remaining numbers the gutted  Statistics Canada can provide and arbitrarily decide to chop income disparity by between 20 and 50 per cent over, say, five years. All of which are nice, round numbers that signify precisely nothing.  

Politicians play the poverty card because they think it makes them appear virtuous. But as they stop chasing their opponents’ tails, they merely set their sites on their own.

Poverty is one of those social bedevilments, like illiteracy, that’s impregnable to partisan maledictions or entreaties. It does not recognize doctrinal superiority. In fact, you best attack it by throwing politics out the window, joining hands across party lines and drinking deeply from the wishing well of good public intentions. 

Once that’s done, you spend a whole bunch of money literally reinventing pre-school and primary education systems in this province.

Progressive think tanks, university educators, child advocates – even the Paris-based Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) – have all come to the same conclusion: Early Childhood Education, or ECE, plays a vital role in ameliorating the effects of poverty on families and provides disadvantaged kids with a leg up and out of their impoverished circumstances.

The Carolina Abecedarian Project conceived 30 years ago at the Frank Porter Graham Child Development Institute at the University of North Carolina ay Chapel Hill remains one of the best-known and persuasive longitudinal studies in the field of early development. The initiative, a controlled experiment, was designed to ferret out the  benefits for poor children, if any, of early childhood education. 

According to its findings, “Children who participated in the early intervention program had higher cognitive test scores from the toddler years to age 21. Academic achievement in both reading and math was higher from the primary grades through young adulthood. Intervention children completed more years of education and were more likely to attend a four-year college. Mothers whose children participated in the program achieved higher educational and employment status than mothers whose children were not in the program.”

Even some economists now believe that ECE is a formidable weapon in the public-policy arsenal for combatting poverty. 

In a paper he published last October, Craig Alexander, senior vice-president of TD Bank Group, wrote that “more access to affordable and high quality pre-school education could help to boost literacy and numeracy skills and would help to reduce income inequality in the long run. . .Most studies show that a one dollar investment reaps a long-term return of 1.5-to-3 dollars, and the return on investment for children from low income households can be in the double digits.”

ECE will not eliminate poverty right away; it efficacious effects are generational. And it does cost money – a commodity that’s in short supply in these parts these days.

But collaborating to find a funding solution is a far nobler way for our elected Grits and Tories to pass the time than is sniping at each other over poverty reduction policies and programs that won’t work anyway.

 

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