Category Archives: Democracy

Jun 08 2015
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Democracy, Government, Politics, Security

Fear and loathing in prime time

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Canada, I sometimes worry, has become a bad sitcom in the American style – its elected leaders more interested in their Ward Cleaver-cum-Richie Cunningham vacuities than in their duties to office in what was once a great and global democracy of truly nourishing values.

Shall we now “Leave it to Beaver” in the evermore of “Happy Days”?

Pierre Blais, a former federal Tory minister of public safety, thinks that’s just fine if it means expanding the Government of Canada’s power to spy on its own citizens. In a “loose-lips-sinks-ships” sort of polemic, the new honcho of nation’s Security Intelligence Review Committee told the Globe and Mail in an exclusive interview last week, “Terrorists, they don’t have borders. When they decide to put a bomb somewhere – the railroad or in Parliament – they don’t care. They just do it. Governments have to adapt to that with their legislation.”

In fact, he assured his interviewers, “We know that CSIS sometimes has to be more intrusive. And I think the Canadian population accepts that.”

In the same Globe piece, the country’s spymaster, Michel Coulombe was explicit: “It could go into disrupting a financial transaction done through the Internet, disabling a mobile device. . .and tampering with equipment.”

Still, who watches the watchdogs? What, exactly, justifies the Conservative government’s new Bill C-51 and all of its paranoiac rhetoric, except, perhaps, a heartfelt determination to pitch the body politic back into a 21st-century version of Cold War mania?

Are we, in this country, so threatened by enemies both domestic and foreign that we are willing to succumb? Have we finally filled that prime-time slot of fear and loathing in our own lives that we once assuaged with frequent viewings of the “Beaver”, “Gilligan’s Island”, “The Love Boat”, “Lost” and, more recently and perniciously, the poverty-porn of reality TV?

If Mr. Blais is correct (and I suspect that he is in more ways that even he appreciates), we have become willing supplicants to an exaggerated tale of woe and wobbly logic in this fine land of ours.

Fact: Violent crime rates hover at a 40-year low; in fact, it’s safer to be alive in Canada now than it was when I was a teenager growing up in Halifax.

Fact: Gun-play across the nation is down, as are break-and-enters and physical assaults.

Fact: Marijuana use has not produced a generation of drooling idiots; the laws against it have merely swollen the ranks of the incarcerated in underfunded, poorly equipped penitentiaries where (guess what?) the young apprentice at the feet of the old, unreconstructed criminals in their midst.

As for domestic terrorism and foreign insurgencies, law enforcement authorities, and their political masters, will argue that the threat is both eminent and imminent. Naturally, though, they won’t articulate their reasons. Apparently, our best interests are protected as long as we remain utterly ignorant of our surroundings and environment (cue: “The Truman Show”), and the rights and freedoms we are constitutionally owed.

One of these is the right to know the truth of our government’s activities, with or without our consent. Another is the freedom from unnecessary scrutiny by public agencies that fully adore their sanctimonious pronouncements about what is, and is not, good for the rest of us.

Our finest hour might arrive when our elected officials finally decide that they actually live in the real world, and not in some facsimile manufactured, like a bad 70s sitcom, for the camera and the boobs who are glued to it.

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Jun 05 2015
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Democracy, Politics, Security

The new cone of silence

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We, all of us, had begun to think that nothing we said, did or even felt was private. After all, doesn’t London, England, maintain the largest collection of closed-circuit television cameras in public spaces of any city in the entire world?

We had even begun to suspect that in our own hometowns on this side of the pond, we weren’t actually safe from the prying eyes of spooks and creeps in the employ of Canada’s secret services.

In fact, we’ve lived with the conviction that our lives have not been our own since the last episode of the X-Files, just in time for the first episode of the George W. Bush/Dick Cheney road show.

An entire generation of voters in North America has not only grown accustomed to having its personal information mined and consumed by complete strangers – it has come to welcome it.

As Daniel Newman, a technology journalist, wrote in Forbes Magazine’s online platform last year, “With social media users well over a billion and a growing mobile and wearable trends that puts us online almost around the clock, we are ever connected and endlessly sharing what seems like our every idea.

“This feeling of connectedness undoubtedly gives many a sense of community and happiness, as it is through the sharing of our everyday lives that we are able to garner the feedback we seek and the validity that we need.

However, if we are fooled, for even a moment, as to what all of this is really about – the desire to have us tethered without wires and connected without cost – then we are delusional. . .I, for one, can say that I have almost never read the privacy policy of an application I downloaded.”

Indeed, we may be delusional. But when, this week, the U.S. Senate reformed one of the signature Acts – introduced in the aftermath of the 9-11 catastrophe to curtail individual privacy rights – for the first time in more than a decade confusion suddenly became clarity.

“Reversing U.S. security policy that had been in place since shortly after the September 11, 2001, attacks, the bill would end a system exposed by former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowdon in 2013,” a Reuters report stipulated. “A federal appeals court on May 7 ruled the collection of ‘metadata’ illegal. The new law would require telephone companies to collect and store telephone ‘metadata’ the same way that they do now for billing purposes. But instead of routinely feeding U.S. intelligence agencies such data, the companies would be required to turn it over only in response to a government request.”

Oh, well, fellow plebes and peons, at least it’s a start in the right direction.

The notion that the state – which eschews paying for anything that might actually improve the minds, moods and attitudes of the citizens who fund it ­– works for the people has been discredited in so many present ways and means. That the Obama Administration – so hopeful, so fundamentally feckless – has finally managed to push through a truly progressive piece of legislation is, frankly, a miracle of American politics.

Could such an epiphany materialize here, in the Great White North?

Currently, our putative whistleblowers remain underground. They don’t seek asylum in sketchy nations where the weather is even worse than Canada’s. They wait in silence, knowing that nothing they say or do is actually private. They, who do the government’s business, keep their heads down.

After all, doesn’t Ottawa maintain the second-largest collection of closed-circuit television cameras in public spaces of any city in the entire world?

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May 20 2015
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Culture, Democracy, Politics

A lost cause worth fighting

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It was a fine and noble attempt to protect their constitutionally guaranteed freedoms, even a Cri de Coeur. But as almost all heartfelt outcries fail to achieve the objectives of their champions, so, too, is this one doomed to fall on deaf ears in the nation’s increasingly belligerent capital.

According a report in the Globe and Mail, “public-service unions are asking the federal government for the first time to enshrine scientific integrity language into their collective agreements. The language is intended to ensure that researchers employed by the federal government can speak openly about their work, publish results without fear of censorship and collaborate with peers.”

Federal scientists – those on the payroll of the public service of Canada – have long admonished their bureaucratic bosses and political masters for what they see, not unreasonably, as a coordinated program to muzzle them in the media. For years, they have decried the current government’s determination to vet their public comments through communications officers (even, on occasion, the Prime Minister’s Office).

Indeed, their confederates in the world’s scientific community, dutifully shocked and appalled at the treatment Canadian researchers have received in the bland, dusty halls of Ottawa officialdom, have come to man the ramparts on their behalf and in the interest of scientific enquiry everywhere.

And the issue has, in recent times, caught fire in some of the stalwarts of the international press.

“Over the last few years, the government of has made it harder and harder for publicly financed scientists to communicate with the public and with other scientists,” former New York Times editorial board member Verlyn Klinkenborg opined in 2013. “There was trouble of this kind here (the United States) in the George W. Bush years, when scientists were asked to toe the party line on climate policy and endangered species. But nothing came close to what is being done in Canada.”

Mr. Klinkenborg further observed: “It is also designed to make sure that nothing gets in the way of the northern resource rush – the feverish effort to mine the earth and the ocean with little regard for environmental consequences. The policy seems designed to make sure that the tar sands project proceeds quietly. . .To all the other kinds of pollution the tar sands will yield, we must now add another: the degradation of vital streams of research and information.”

Yes, we might.

Still, despite Mr. Klinkenbord’s principled objection to official Canadian government policy – and, in fact, this new, bold effort by this nation’s public-service unions to “enshrine” the rights of scientists in their collective agreements – nothing meaningful is likely to happen; certainly, nothing significant in an election year.

That’s because, though most adult Canadians who are polled about such matters express a “sincere” desire for freedom of expression, especially among the educated, informed and well-intentioned, when push comes to shove, they still prefer the strong arm of this cabinet’s patriarchal approach to governance. They still believe that imminent peril lurks behind every street corner and that, in the end, loose lips sink ships.

Consider, as evidence, the latest public opinion surveys, which show the current Conservative government enjoying a fairly healthy lead over both the national NDP and Liberal parties. The reason: people in this country tend to fall into the gravity well of an incumbent who has not totally screwed up the economy or abandoned the largely apocryphal, though resonant, storyboard of threats to domestic security.

We may yet hope that freedom of speech, even for government employees, is a Cri de Coeur that will be heard.

More likely, though, it will remain a heartbreak nursed only in silence.

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May 07 2015
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Democracy, Government

Biting the hand that hits

 

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Government watchdogs are constitutionally bred to be independent, objective, honest, and, of course, funded. How else can they protect the people’s business from the occasional, sometimes unwitting, predations of their political caretakers?

But, every so often, when its collar is fixed too tightly and its leash is tugged too quickly, even the best-behaved terrier of truth will snarl, spit and promptly defecate on the shoes of its hapless walker.

And so, we witness New Brunswick Auditor-General Kim MacPherson playing “bad dog” in Premier Brian Gallant’s four-year obedience class.

To be sure, Ms. MacPherson insists that her province-wide road show explaining what she does for living, why it’s important, and how it helps democracy from slipping into the black hole of ambivalence has nothing to do with politics.

Forget the fact that her budget’s been frozen at $2 million a year, that she needs staff to finish the work she’s legally obligated to complete, and that her cries to obtain these resources might as well be dog whistles falling on the ears of deaf ministers.

No, no, she says, her new “outreach program” has everything to do with –for lack of better words – proactivity and positivity. (Lord knows, children, we need more of that in the spin-cities of Canadian governance).

Let me make myself perfectly clear, she told Saint John Telegraph-Journal legislative scribe Chris Morris, this week, “It (the speaking tour) stems from the fact that in the past year we have a new strategic plan, and one of the strategic objectives is to increase public awareness of the role of the auditor general and the reports. It is to make people more aware of our work.”

Funny, that. Back in March before the snow melted and the dog parks opened, Ms. MacPherson had this to say: “I feel that out office is under-resourced. We’re barely scratching the surface. There is much more that we could and should be doing.”

Now, she tells Ms. Morris, “I am conscious of the fact that these are difficult fiscal times, and it is difficult to come up with new money to add to anyone’s budget.”

Still, the A-G is angling to become a particular animal that no sitting government of any political stripe ever wants to see: a political watchdog that’s determined to issue regular, scheduled reports throughout a given year rather than one, annual omnibus piece that’s doomed to obscurity. In this she’s counting on the media to wag her tail (your welcome, auditor).

As Ms. Morris quotes Ms. MacPherson as saying, “It is too much content all at once – about 1,000 pages in one day. We have decided to stagger the content. We are now working on a report to be tabled in mid-June.”

Can’t you just hear the factotums in the Premier’s Office now grind their canines at night? Oh wonderful, they are chomping, how exquisite. How, on earth, did we get ourselves into this particular kennel?

For her part, the A-G has found her freedom by digging under the cage that trapped her. She’s in the wind, happily barking and yipping, paroling the boundaries between official, government bafflegab and the numbers that tell at least some version of the truth about public spending.

According to Ms. Morris: “MacPherson said that when she is in St. Stephen (her first public appearance on her provincial tour), she will talk about the fiscal situation of the province, and some of her office’s recent performance reviews, including the report on the now-defunct Atcon group of companies.”

Bark! Bark!

Bad dog!

Ouch!

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May 05 2015
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Democracy, Politics

What’s in a Tory name?

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Dear youth caucus of the New Brunswick Progressive Conservative Party: I heartily endorse your proposal to drop the word, “Progressive” from your title.

Henceforth, you and your fellow travellers ought to be known properly by those principles you truly espouse. As one of your own explained to the CBC recently, the time has come for change and history is a slave driver.

“A group of young Tories are looking to remove the word ‘Progressive’ from the party’s name at the upcoming annual general meeting,” Mother Corp. reports. “Adam Pottle, a youth executive member of the Progressive Conservative Party of New Brunswick, says the name change is long overdue.

“Pottle said dropping ‘Progressive’ would better reflect reality. ‘The PCs are a bit more to the right end of the spectrum than every other party in New Brunswick and we just felt the word progressive no longer really matched our party,’ he said. Members of the Progressive Conservative Party will vote on the idea on May 23 at the annual general meeting that is being held in Fredericton.”

What’s more, “Pottle said the name change will connect the party to its past. ‘Honestly, we’ve been thinking about it for a while, a few of us. We wanted to bring the party more in line with history – before the early ‘30s, it was just known as the Conservative Party – and also to bring us more in line with our federal counterparts,’ Pottle said.”

As the CBC piece explained, “The federal Conservative Party was formed in 2003 when the Progressive Conservatives merged with the Canadian Alliance. The term ‘progressive’ was not added to the new party’s name.”

Heaven only knows what might have transpired had it been retained.

We might, for one thing, employ a civil service that’s not afraid of its own shadow, not looking for enemies and spooks behind every corner of its ever-shrinking cubicles.

We might, for another, enjoy a political culture that encourages open and honest debate, instead of one that shuts doors and windows as soon as the aroma of principled dissent subsumes that of microwaved popcorn at high noon.

We might also remember, if not always revere, the actions of men like Robert Stanfield, Brian Mulroney and Richard Hatfield, of women like Pat Carney, Flora MacDonald and Barbara McDougall. In their own progressive ways, these “PCs” changed the country without letting the country turn them into simulacra of Liberal presumption and entitlement.

But, sure, youngsters, go ahead. Reinvent yourselves. Recuse yourselves. Be all that you can be. Just don’t kid yourselves about the influence your re-branding efforts exert.

The Conservative Party you seek to emulate – seek to join – gives less than a nanosecond of time to anyone outside the inner circle of Canadian politics. (Frankly, they way things are going, neither do the federal Grits).

In any case, yours is not the Reform party; yours is the Establishment party. And it really doesn’t like party crashers from the youth wing stumbling into its dessert bars and piano soirees long past their bedtime.

A Wiki entry stipulates that Progressive-Conservatism in Canada had a bonafide lifespan. “The Progressive Conservative Party of Canada (1942–2003) was a Canadian federal political party with a centre-right stance on economic issues and, after the 1970s, a centrist stance on social issues,” it says.

Now comes your better times in this fair province, if you can trump your elders. On this score, be as bold as youth demands.

Call yourselves the “Regressive Conservative Party of New Brunswick”.

Dudes, you can hardly go wrong.

True that.

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Apr 30 2015
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Culture, Democracy

What, us worry?

 

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So we are, after all, a rollicking, jolly bunch. We stick our fingers in our ears and sing “la…la…la”. We believe in the power of positive thinking and even giggle appreciatively when some curmudgeon suggests we’d be better off sticking our digits in the fiscal dam that’s just about to break in this province.

Oh well, what shall do about the inveterately “happy” amongst us?

Give them all a kiss, a slap on the back, a high-five?

Sure, why not. After all, summer is the best two-and-a-half weeks of the year in these parts, and the rumors are that it didn’t actually die in 2015, after plummeting into a pothole sometime between the first snowfall and the last.

Maybe it’s time to accept the fact that despite what nature and man throw at us in this often-benighted corner of the world, we refuse to be sad, morose or even (gasp!) realistic about our present circumstances. Maybe it’s time to take the win, for a change.

According to a Statistics Canada survey released last week Saint John and Moncton are the fourth and seventh happiest cities, respectively, in Canada. This, despite the fact that downtown development in both bustling metropolises is moribund, house prices are plummeting, for-sale signs are springing up like tulips in an April downpour, and municipal mothers and fathers are just about at the end of their wits trying to figure out how to keep the figurative wheels from falling off their metaphorical trucks.

Still, reveals StatsCan, “Many factors account for differences in life satisfaction, and there is a growing body of international and Canadian research in this domain. This includes work that examines the role played by the physical characteristics of geographic areas, such as urban size and population density, natural endowments, economic opportunity or deprivation, and access to, and quality of, infrastructure, amenities and services.”

Sure, and why not jump aboard the “happiness” train? It goes to Pleasantville by way of the big, rock candy mountain. There, at that mythical depot, we will meet all who went away from us, and all who will return someday – just as soon as we can invent and sustain good, long-term jobs for them upon their arrival.

This “happiness” garbage is a pug’s game, played by the powerful to rook the penurious. If we spent more time genuinely examining that for which we are grateful, we might discover the joy that’s mere illusion to a vast swath of our fellow men and women, under the influence of daily propaganda.

I am, for example, grateful for a democracy in which periodic voting is not always a pro-forma exercise designed to establish and enable despotism.

I am grateful for knowing that I can still count on my neighbours ­– even some elected representatives of my province and country – to boost me when the economic chips are down.

I am grateful for my parents, siblings, wife, daughters, sons-in-law and grandchildren and for the fact that they are alive and kicking against the bleak and black of daily imbecilities that seem to proscribe everyone’s life these days.

I am grateful for the home I can offer to them, for the absurd amounts of snow I shovel, for the weeds I pull, for the lawn I mow, for the people I meet at the local Sobeys and liquor store, for the guy I greet at the corner of Main Street and Robinson Court – the guy who needs a coin or two to continue singing and playing his acoustic renditions of Neil Young’s “Cinnamon Girl” and “Old Man”.

Am I happy?

Ask me after the next federal election.

For now, I’m merely waiting, with ears wide open.

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Feb 22 2015
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Democracy, Idiocracy, Politics

Whose democracy 
is it, anyway?

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If those who doubted that the national police force is now working for the political office of the reigning government, let those fine, pristine sensibilities fade into the harsh reality of a hard, partisan winter.

The Harper government has retailed two – and only two – presiding ideological platforms over its well-worn terms in office.

The first is that it, and only it, is the peerless steward of economic growth in this country; the second is that it, and only it, is the last defence against the hordes of human demons and other assorted bad guys determined to upend our constitutional democracy.

The first conceit is patently false, as the national government hasn’t raised a well-appointed finger to encourage anything close to durable economic development in eight years.

In fact, it has gone out if its way to play favourites with the western oil patch at the expense of less flashy, though more sustainable industries.

The result has been predictable: an unemployment rate that, while down nationally to 6.6 per cent, remains as high as 20 per cent in rural areas and even urban enclaves not blessed with dirty bitumen. Now that global oil prices are on the run, it is only natural to expect Canada’s presumptive protectors of the public peace to tar everyone who doubts their sincerity with the same black brush they use to colour their annual balance sheets.

This rather obviously brings me to my second concern, which is: What, on earth, does the RCMP think it’s doing by shilling for the federal Conservatives on environmental stewardship?

Shawn McCarthy’s recent piece in the Globe and Mail aptly serves the point. “The RCMP has labelled the ‘anti-petroleum’ movement as a growing and violent threat to Canada’s security, raising fears among environmentalists that they face increased surveillance, and possibly worse, under the Harper government’s new terrorism legislation,” he writes.

“In highly charged language that reflects the government’s hostility toward environmental activists, an RCMP intelligence assessment warns that foreign-funded groups are bent on blocking oil sands expansion and pipeline construction, and that the extremists in the movement are willing to resort to violence.”

The report cites the 2013 cop-car burnings in Rexton, New Brunswick, as evidence of increasing radicalism everywhere without bothering to differentiate between the actions of a very few and the broad, peaceful concerns of the very many.

Reports McCarthy, quoting directly from the report: “‘There is a growing, highly organized and well-financed anti-Canada petroleum movement that consists of peaceful activists, militants and violent extremists who are opposed to society’s reliance on fossil fuels,’ concludes the report which is stamped ‘protected/Canadian eyes only’ and is dated Jan. 24, 2014. The report was obtained by Greenpeace . . . If violent environmental extremists engage in unlawful activity, it jeopardizes the health and safety of its participants, the general public and the natural environment.’”

Fine; but how do you conflate peaceable, law-abiding citizens’ legitimate concerns with violent extremism without driving a nail through the democratic principles that lets you issue such verbal nonsense in the first place?

This “waiting-for-terrorists-to-strike-from-the-shadows” mentality has overtaken our public spaces, our private conversations, our personal expectations and perhaps even our conception of ourselves as members of an inclusive plurality.

Do we jump, do we fight, do we run away?

Surely, we don’t listen to anything but the blow horn from Parliament Hill anymore.

Neither, it seems, do the national cops, now more willing than ever to give their political masters the partisan wherewithal to scare enough voters into hating tree-huggers in the name of catching a few ill-minded radicals.

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Feb 05 2015
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Democracy, Economy, Politics

Clucking all the way to the knowledge(less) bank

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Chickens come home to roost in surprising numbers, even when the coop has been closed and the barn doors have been bolted. Any farmer will tell you this.

Of course, we don’t listen to farmers, or barn builders or coop-tenders, anymore. We no longer regard the expert opinions of teachers, economists, writers, artists, scientists, urban planners, and early childhood developers.

And when we talk to our neighbours, who may have something cogent to say about the way we live now, we’re apt to smile lamely as we dismiss their pontifications as rarified opinions. . .Nothing to do with us.

Evidence is, after all, just a matter of conjecture – is it not?

That, at any rate, is what certain federal politicians want us to embrace and hold close to our hearts, as, thanks to them, we have been without a mandatory long-form census at Statistics Canada for nearly five years.

But, wait, the chickens are finally coming home to roost.

According to a Globe and Mail story this week, “planners” insist that the cancellation, in 2010, of this worthy instrument of public and social policy – on nothing more than a whim to warm the backbenches of certain Conservative office holders in Ottawa – has “damaged research in key areas, from how immigrants are doing in the labour market to how the middle class is faring, while making it more difficult for cities to ensure taxpayer dollars are being spent wisely.”

How? The answer is: We literally don’t know.

We don’t know enough to ask the right questions, sculpt the right surveys, obtain the right data.

What we suspect, however, is that the preponderance of evidence we do have strongly indicates that our federal government, in its move from a formal census to a voluntary question-and-answer sheet, actively wants to keep Canadians in the dark about themselves and their communities.

Worse, the new-normal actually costs taxpayers more money. “The last census in 2011 cost a total of $652-million, including an extra $22-million due to the change to the voluntary National Household Survey, “ the Globe reports. “The total budget for the 2016 census won’t be decided until February or March, Statscan has said. But the current plan is to hold another voluntary survey. All told, 35,000 people will be hired for this effort.”

Says Charles Beach, a Queen’s University professor of economics, in the Globe piece: “It has certainly impacted my own work on what has been happening to middle-class earnings in Canada.”

Indeed, he says, it has “inhibited research into inequality and identifying winners and losers in economic growth, research into understanding the national problems of the have-nots in the economy, and research into how best to provision local government services.”

Adds Harvey Low, Toronto’s man in charge of social research for that city: “It has definitely had an impact in the way we plan for services. . .We are less sure. . .We definitely have to spend extra dollars on pursuing other sources of data. . .and the staff time to assess whether we can use it to compare over time.”

Meanwhile, complains Sara Mayo of the Social Planning and Research Council of Hamilton, Ontario: “In terms of fiscal prudence, this made no sense. Why would any government want to pay more for worse-quality data?”

As the group, Evidence for Democracy astutely notes: “Voluntary surveys receive lower response rates when compared to mandatory ones. Typically, vulnerable populations [new immigrants, Aboriginals, low-income, single parents] and those with the highest income have lower response rates; thus, data about their demographics is poorly represented in voluntary surveys. This lack of robust information about important groups leads to skewed data sets, poor decision-making, and costly government policy mistakes.”

Shall we count the ways in which governments make poor policy decisions even when presented with good, countable evidence?

After all, the price of oil was supposed to soar forever, pundits insisted, despite the fact that, historically, it has always plunged.

Cluck, cluck. Something scratching this way comes.

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Feb 04 2015
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Democracy, Politics, Security

Move over RCMP. . .there’s a new kid in town

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As the Harper government openly discusses its efforts to transform this country’s civilian spy agency from a strictly intelligence-gathering organization to an effective police force – imbued with all the powers of search, seizure and, if necessary, apprehension – it steadfastly refuses to speak plainly about its plans for the nation’s fighting men and women in some of the world’s most dangerous places.

According to a report this week in the Globe and Mail, the federal government’s new “anti-terrorism legislation, which was unveiled Friday (January 30), would give CSIS (the Canadian Security Intelligence Service) the right to disrupt terrorist activity, such as by pulling suspected terrorists off planes or messing with their bank accounts. A judge would have to sign off on such actions ahead of time. The legislation would also make it easier to arrest people for promoting terrorism.”

This is a fair distance down the road from the agency’s embarkation point, articulated in the early 1980s and reiterated currently on the inveterate data-miner’s official website: “The Service’s role is to investigate threats, analyze information and produce intelligence. It then reports to, and advises, the Government of Canada to protect the country and its citizens. . .CSIS’ proactive role complements law enforcement agencies such as police forces, which investigate crime and collect evidence to support prosecutions in courts of law.”

Apparently, complementing law enforcement agencies is no longer enough. CSIS must now become one among that number.

Again, according to a Globe report, the new legislation would also, “criminalize the advocacy or promotion of terrorism (fair enough); lower the threshold for preventative arrest or detention of suspected extremists (uh-oh); relax the requirements necessary to prevent suspected jihadis from boarding a plane (hmmm); grant government departments explicit authority to share private information, including passport applications, or confidential commercial data, with law enforcement agencies (do tell); make it easier for authorities to track and monitor suspects.”

All of which raises natural questions about CSIS’s 30-year role coordinating and collaborating with actual cops.

Has it, or has it not, been doing its mandated job? And if the answer is, “no, it hasn’t”, then how much more success will it enjoy when its desk-bound intelligence analysts suddenly find themselves with upgraded badges?

“Good afternoon, ma’am, I’m agent Mulder. . .This is my partner, Scully. . .We’d like to ask you some questions.”

“No, Scully, I’m Mulder, you were Mulder last week (and besides she’s a he).”

“Sorry about that. . .Let’s start over.”

“Good afternoon, sir, I’m agent Scully. . .This is my partner, Mulder. . .We’d like to ask you some questions.”

And yet, even as Harpertown seeks to equip its spooks with new powers to reveal – and act on – the ‘truth’ about the alleged bad boys and girls in our midst, it has no compunction about withholding information about its own military actions abroad.

The recent deployment in Iraq, for example, was sold to Canadian citizens as a support operation to NATO. Not even Canada’s Chief of Defence, General Tom Lawson, is wagging that tail anymore. Speaking before a House of Commons’ committee last week, he stipulated that “we’re seeing an evolution of that mission.”

The evolution’s end being: directing drone strikes on Islamic militants, engaging directly in a shooting war with combatants and. . .well, comporting themselves in a way that not even the Americans are willing to embrace.

Or, as Stephen Chase of the Globe wrote last week, “The U.S. military says Canada’s military advisers are the only coalition forces it knows of that have engaged in firefights with Islamic State militants in Iraq and that American troops have not, to date, been authorized to direct air strikes from the ground as Canadians are doing.”

If this is the necessary work of our foreign force, so be it; but, then, why hide the policy behind weasel words, coarse deflection and transparent partisanship?

“This is really what we get from our opposition,” Mr. Harper told the Commons last week. “Every time we talk about security, they suggest that somehow, our freedoms are threatened. I think Canadians understand that their freedom and their security more often than not go hand and hand. Canadians expect us to do both, we are doing both, and we do not buy the argument that every time you protect Canadians, you take away their liberties.”

Sure, Father Canada, whatever you say.

After all, you will soon know what everyone in this vast, compromised democracy thinks and does.

The truth is out there.

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Feb 02 2015
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Democracy, Government, Politics

Are government workers servants or syphons of prosperity?

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Do civil servants in Atlantic Canada earn too much money for what they do? Are too many of them routinely showing up at the public trough?

These are two, separate questions, and as provocative as they are, they tend to conflate in the hands of traditional, market-driven advocates who are convinced that small government – in the absence of no government, at all – represents the best of all possible worlds.

Almost no one, these days, talks about efficient government, a notion that once held a place of prominence in the thinking rooms and chat parlors of the early 1960s across North America – and, of course, never again.

But does efficient government mean fewer workers doing less work or a greater number of workers doing more important work?

The Halifax-based Atlantic Institute for Market Studies (AIMS) is convinced that the regional economy will be improved by radically cutting its various civil services.

“In all four Atlantic provinces, the public sector workforce is significantly larger, relative to population, than the national average,” writes Ben Eisen, director of research, and Shaun Fantauzzo, policy analyst, at AIMS, in a recent commentrary.

“Furthermore, the gap in average compensation between public and private sector workers is larger in the region than in most other parts of the country. As governments across the region seek to identify strategies to control deficits and net debt, working gradually to reduce the public sector wage bill is one option that deserves careful attention.”

Additionally, they contend, “according to recent data from Statistics Canada, in 2013, the civilian public sector in Canada accounted for 18 per cent of all jobs nationally. By comparison, this figure is 23 per cent in Atlantic Canada, where all provinces exceed the national average on this metric. In Prince Edward Island, the figure is 23 per cent, in Nova Scotia it is 22 per cent and in New Brunswick it is 20 per cent. In Newfoundland and Labrador, 28 per cent of all jobs are found in the civilian public sector, the highest level in the country.”

To which an unaligned observer might wonder: So what?

Don’t these folks who work on the public dime also pay taxes, buy houses, enroll their kids in day-care programs, contribute to charities, underwrite the cost of their children’s university educations?

Are they not, in so many regards, just like the rest of us?

It’s not the salaries and benefits they earn, or even their numbers, that should concern us. It’s what they do with their time in the course of their daily duties. And that has everything to do with the frigid, disingenuous corporate culture they endure and to which they are too often inured.

Successive federal and Atlantic provincial governments have, in recent years, forced their bureaucracies to carry the water buckets of public opprobrium. After all, why not? Civil servants are easy targets, easily manipulated to do their political masters’ bidding on pain of various employment adjustment programs and other vile euphemisms for: “You’re fired and you have five minutes to clean out your desk.”

Now, we perceive in New Brunswick a wholly cynical move to buy public approval  by curtailing the legal bargaining powers of unions that represent civil servants.

Or, as the province’s duly appointed Czar of strategic review, Health Minister Victor Boudreau, told the Saint John Telegraph-Journal not long ago: “What happens in settling some of these wages is a bit of what they call a leap frog, where one province settles with a particular union. . .and then in the next province, their contract is up six months later, so they want to be two per cent higher than the province that just settled.”

Again, so what?

Should we not wheel this issue back to the central discussion where it belongs?

Which civil servants in Atlantic Canada earn too much money for what they do? Which ones arrive at the public trough with little or nothing to show for their slight effort to make an appearance?

The issue is not, ultimately, about big government versus small government.

It’s only about good government.

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